In the latter parts of the study, the company looked specifically at social network membership data for users of the AOL, Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo webmail services. Not surprisingly, the study found that Facebook was the most popular network across the board. What's more interesting is how well MySpace fared in some cases. On both the Hotmail and Yahoo webmail services, Facebook only had a small lead. Here, around 20% of all Hotmail and Yahoo webmail users were found to be on Facebook and MySpace. What does this reveal about the Hotmail and Yahoo user base? That they're a little more behind the times? Or that they've been around on the net longer and at one time had created (and possibly now abandoned) their MySpace pages? Unfortunately, the study can't provide us with these sorts of answers.

The study also showed that Twitter is far more popular among Gmail users than anyone else. In fact, on the other services, it's 4-5 times less popular than Facebook. We would like to think that's because Gmail users are just more web-savvy and cool, but it's possible that it's because they're just younger than everyone else.

Not surprisingly, LinkedIn is the least popular social network, but as Rapleaf points out, many LinkedIn users may have registered with their business email instead.

Participation Levels - Hotmail Users have Most Profiles, Gmail Users Better-Connected

When it comes to how the webmail users participate on social networks, Rapleaf found that the majority of the users have only one social media profile. But the service where the average number of profiles is the highest might surprise you - it's Hotmail. There the average is 2.5 profiles per user. Hotmail is followed by Yahoo, then AOL, and it's Gmail users who have the least number of social media profiles. That finding seems odd considering that Gmail users are younger and more likely to use Twitter in addition to Facebook. In fact, it almost seems like this data doesn't even fit with the rest of the study.

However, the discovery that Gmail users are better-connected than the other users makes more sense. On average, Gmail users have the most friends on social networks with 46.2 friends while Yahoo users have the least with 40.0.

Since again, Gmail users tend to be younger than the rest, it goes to reason that they would be in a demographic where their peers are more likely to have social membership profiles. Older webmail users, meanwhile, are still signing up for these sites. Although baby boomers and other middle-aged folks are joining sites like Facebook in droves these days, social networks are still dominated by the young.

Methodology

For the Rapleaf study, the company sampled 120,000 webmail accounts from users with @aol.com, @gmail.com, @hotmail.com and @yahoo.com email addresses. They then looked into the users' age, gender and social networking data by collecting information from public social media profiles. Obviously, in doing so, they've skewed their findings a bit, as the company notes in their original blog post. However, the sample size is large enough to form some conclusions about the members of these services, even if it relied on a particular subset of users.

A vulgar comment was made by a reader of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch's website on Friday on an article about the strangest things you've ever eaten. The headline was practically asking for a juvenile response and, thanks to the anonymity of the internet, that's exactly what happened. In the comments section of the article, one user posted a single word response referring to a part of a woman's anatomy. Of course, the site's moderators quickly deleted the comment but it soon reappeared - obviously this juvenile was intent on having their say.

But this time, instead of just deleting the comment in question, the site's director of social media, Kurt Greenbaum, did a little sleuthing too. He found that the commenter's IP address was coming from a local school...and that's where this story starts to get interesting.

Greenbaum contacted the school and made them aware of the situation. In his defense, he probably thought he was simply tattle-telling on a naughty student who would learn a valuable lesson about internet anonymity and would have to sit through a week's detention or something of the like. Instead, he cost a school employee his job.

Yes, as it turns out, the commenter in question wasn't a juvenile after all, just someone with a juvenile mind. Greenbaum learned of the firing when the school phoned him back six hours later to report their findings. They had confronted the employee and he had resigned.

Crossing the Line? Or Justice Served?

The question being hotly debated now is did Greenbaum go too far? Or did the commenter get what they deserved?

Mathew Ingram, the blogger and communities editor for Toronto's The Globe and Mail, writes on his personal blog that his paper's site has seen hundreds or even thousands of comments, most of which are much worse than the one Greenbaum saw, but he would never - and has never - contacted someone's workplace about them. He calls Greenbaum's actions "over-the-top" and apparently, many commenters on STLtoday.com's website agree, calling out Greenbaum over this incident.

And yet Greenbaum seems to show no remorse, responding to one commenter who accused him of hating moderating so much that he decided to get someone fired by saying: "Yeah, you caught me! I made him log on to his computer at work, visit STLtoday.com's Talk of the Day, read the item, type a vulgarity and hit the 'submit' key."

Sixteen pages of comments now follow that initial interaction, and the majority of them seem to agree that Greenbaum crossed a line, save for the occasional concerned parent who didn't like the idea of this vulgarity-posting person hanging around their children instead of doing his job.

Lesson to Be Learned: Watch What You Say!

We can't blame Greenbaum for the sleuthing bit - any blogger will tell you they've been tempted to hunt down the identities of nasty commenters from time to time. But calling someone's work? That's just wrong.

Yet while Greenbaum may have been seriously misguided to do what he did, this should be another sobering reminder to anyone trolling the net that what you type may come back and haunt you one day. There's no such thing as true anonymity on the net these days, and thanks to new technologies like Facebook Connect, the days where you can hide behind a made-up web handle may be numbered. In fact, Facebook itself may even owe its success to how it forces users to post with their "real" name and identity notes blogger Kent Newsome. "With a name comes accountability, and there is a direct correlation between accountability and behavior," he writes.

That may be true, but the fact of the matter is that the STLtoday website allows anonymous comments. When you make that choice, then you have to expect that some of them will need moderation - it's just part of the job. Regardless of the site's policies about vulgarity, phoning the employer seems like an over-reaction to the incident. But that's just our opinion. What do you think?

For example, location-based services (LBS) - there still isn't one single app which everyone uses to find their friends out in the real world via their mobile phones. Instead, we have a number of similar but competing applications all vying to be the Facebook of location-based apps.

Another example is money payments - this type of service is having more of an impact in the developing world right now where access to banks is more difficult than here in the Western world where people just want the convenience of paying through their mobiles. When was the last time you paid someone or paid at checkout through your mobile phone? Never? That sounds about right.

The List

The full list is as follows:

1. Money Transfer: This refers to people sending money via SMS messages. Like mobile payments, this service has more appeal in developing markets for now. However, there may come a time when even using your debit card seems passé, while paying for something with actual cash seems downright ancient.
2. Location-Based Services: As mentioned above, there are still far too many services to choose from when it comes to location-based social networking, fragmenting the market. Your friends on Loopt are often different than those on Brightkite and that list is different than those on Foursquare. But LBS extends to more than social networks - it includes any application that taps into your phone's GPS capabilities to offer up location-based services of any kind, whether that's local business reviews or directions to the nearest Starbucks. Gartner says this will be one of the most disruptive technologies in the future, with a user base growing from 96 million in 2009 to 526 million in 2012.
3. Mobile Search: No, mobile search isn't new, but on the mobile platform, it may get shaken up a bit. Gartner predicts that consumers won't necessarily be sticking with the search services they know and use on the Web (think Google, Bing, Yahoo) and instead experiment with using a few different search providers that have "unique technologies" for mobile search. While that statement is a little vague, it sounds like good news for services like Taptu who have entered this field with search offerings designed from the ground-up for mobile devices.
4. Mobile Browsing: Saying that mobile browsing technologies will be heavily used in the future sounds a little bit like stating the obvious. But as Gartner notes, mobile browsing capabilities currently exist only on 60%+ of handsets today. By 2013, that number will climb to 80%, meaning that those who are still using the app-less,more basic feature phones will still be joining the mobile web in mass numbers over the coming years. That's also good news for web developers who can build mobile web applications to cater to this bunch as opposed to focusing all their efforts into building apps for the numerous mobile platforms like the iPhone, Android, RIM, and others.
5. Mobile Health Monitoring: Another technology whose impact will be felt more heavily in developing markets, mobile health monitoring is still at an early stage of maturity and implementation says Gartner. Project rollouts have been limited to pilot projects for now, but in the coming years the industry will begin to monetize these efforts by offering mobile healthcare monitoring products, services, and solutions to various care delivery organizations.
6. Mobile Payments: Like mobile transfers, mobile payments are more common in developing markets at the moment, but that is quickly changing. Yet even as this type of service grows, Gartner admits there will be challenges. Mobile payments will be a "highly fragmented market" where there will not be "standard practices of deployment," notes the report. That makes it sound like this is one technology that will still need some work, even when 2012 rolls around.
7. Near Field Communications (NFC): More popular in some European and Asian markets than in the U.S., NFC still isn't a standard feature on many of today's phones. That may be about to change, too. In late 2010, Gartner says that NFC-enabled phones will begin to ship in volume, with Asia leading deployments, followed by Europe and North America.
8. Mobile Advertising: Also not new but growing fast, mobile advertising is one of the most important ways to monetize mobile content. Total spending on mobile advertising in 2008 was $530.2 million and it will grow to $7.5 billion in 2012. And mobile advertising will also be used by companies alongside their other campaigns including TV, radio, print, and outdoors.
9. Mobile Instant Messaging: Gartner says that latent user demand and market conditions are conductive to mobile IM's future adoption. It will appeal to developing markets where mobile phones are often the only connectivity device a user owns. But will it be a major app by 2012? It seems that SMS is still the service to beat, especially in the developing world. We'll have to wait and see on this one.
10. Mobile Music: Sure, you have the iPhone, but what about your other options? What about mobile music services - especially those for non-iPhone devices? We're still waiting on Spotify in the U.S., for example, and their competition too. Gartner says that we're beginning to see new innovative models in this area that will include both device (think "Comes with Music") and service bundles.

What's Missing?

A glaring omission from this report is that of Augmented Reality. Gartner had even placed this technology on their "Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, 2009" report earlier this year. Do they not think that AR will have a major impact by 2012? Considering that's only a little over a year away, it could just be too soon for AR to see the widespread adoption that we hoped it would have by then. Or it's possible that - as some have suspected - AR is simply a "cool" way to see and interact with the world around you, but hasn't produced any "must-have," highly useful applications just yet. For example, seeing AR views of local businesses and user recommendations is fun, but is it a markedly better experience than using a service like Yelp? For many, that answer today is "no." AR needs to grow out of being a technology you use "because you can" to one you use "because you have to." Until it's the best option to perform a particular task, it may not make Gartner's next list, either.  

Over the course of the year, there have been countless reports - some more substantial than others - but all with the same message: Generation Y is just not interested in Twitter. The reports generally cited members of this demographic as saying Twitter was "pointless" and "narcissistic."

Apparently, that's beginning to change. Well, maybe not their perception of Twitter, but certainly their use of it. Today, Twitter is now the second-youngest of the top four social networking sites. Its median age is 31. MySpace's is 26, LinkedIn is 39, and, as noted above, Facebook is 33.

When looking at specific younger demographic segments, and not just Gen Y, you can see strong Twitter uptake over the past year. For example, 37% of those 18-24 now use Twitter when only 19% did back in December 2008. And in the slightly older 25-34 bracket, a portion of which could still be considered Gen Y, 31% are now using the service compared to only 20% in December of last year. Combined, these two groups account for more than half of Twitter's network.

Why is Gen Y Now Flocking to Twitter?

So what gives? Why has Gen Y seemingly changed their minds about the social microblogging network that only months ago they avoided? A recent AP article offered up some ideas including the influx of celebrity tweeters, pressure from teachers or bosses, and it even hinted that Gen Y'ers entering the workplace have found value in the network for business-related purposes. That same sentiment was shared by Meredith Sires of Gen Y trend-watching site, YPulse. She theorizes that the rapid growth in the 18-24 demographic has to do more with the recent college graduates segment of that group finding ways to build entirely new online contact lists and create new identities more closely tied to information-sharing.

However, there have not been any in-depth studies that detail all the various reasons that Gen Y has chosen to adopt the microblogging network. To date, everything cited consists of just theories and speculations based on anecdotal evidence. But while all the ideas have merit, the theory that rings truest to our ears is the one put forth by Craig Watkins, a University of Texas professor and author of the book "The Young and the Digital." He says that what we're seeing is "...a kind of closing of that generational gap as it relates to technology." In other words, young and old alike are joining the same networks and socializing in the same spaces.

At this point, we would have to agree. After all, Gen Y (or Gen Z for that matter), hasn't all of a sudden flocked to some new social networking site where the majority of the online user base mostly consists of their peers. Although some niche sites like FML, Failblog, TextsFromLastNight, and Sporcle have apparently attracted this young crowd, their numbers are dwarfed by those of Facebook, Twitter, and the like. It seems as if Gen Y is simply content to join the older adults on the top social networks of today and not strike out on their own...and vice versa. The older social networking users, in turn, never really set up shop on networks designed just for them like the (now "hibernating") Boomj, a social network for baby boomers, or the online old folks home eons.com. They, too, have gravitated towards Facebook and Twitter.

Will this ever change? Will there ever be another network dominated by the digital youth? Of course no one can know for sure, but odds are that unless it's a closed-off network where entry is barred to those over a certain age, any new social network will have trouble keeping the grown-ups out these days. And even if some such network ever sprang into existence, it may struggle to attract the Gen Y members it desires - especially since they're so content to socialize on the sites they already use. And now that they've added Twitter to that list, the challenge to draw them away to yet another social networking site may prove even more difficult than before.

Note: statistics in this article are from Pew Internet's Recent Report on Twitter for Fall 2009

Internet Use and Social Media

That's not to say that there aren't some technology addicts that aren't social isolated - around 6% of the adult online population would fit in this category, having no one with whom they can talk about those important matters and who say they don't have anyone "especially significant" in their life. However, this figure (the 6%) has not grown as access to technology has grown over the years - it has remained virtually unchanged since 1985. This points to the fact that perhaps those who are socially isolated individuals would be so anyway, regardless of what sorts of tools are provided to them, be those mobile phones, PCs with internet access, etc.

For the majority of the online population, technology - and especially social media - has led to more diverse networks than we've ever had before. The report notes that those who participate in social networking services such as Facebook for example, are more likely to interact with people from different backgrounds, different races, different political parties, etc. Specifically, blogging and general internet use was tied to having more racially diverse networks while online photo sharing was tied to having more diverse political discussion partners.

Those who use the internet tend to have 15% more network ties who aren't family members and those who use instant messaging services have 19% more non-kin members in their core networks.

Mobile Phone Use

Along these same lines, the ubiquity of mobile phones hasn't led to decreased face time with family and friends, but just the opposite. On average, a person spends 195 days of the year having mobile phone contact with others, but face-to-face interactions occur on about 210 days per year. In addition, mobile users have around 15% more family members with whom they can discuss important matters and tend to have 25% more core network members who are not family members. Overall, those who use mobile phones have core networks that are 12% larger than those who don't.

Despite all this good news about how technology leads to having larger, more diverse networks, the researchers also found that our networks' size has actually shrunk over the years. Since 1985, there has been a decrease of about 1/3 in their size. The researchers don't suggest any specific reasons for this shrinkage, but they do point out that they can now rule out one possibility for sure: technology.

Although eBay isn't releasing raw stats into the wild, it is publishing editorial content and news on trends as well as a tag cloud of most popular searches right now. Coming soon are multimedia galleries and real-time visualizations of current eBay searches. Can we get an open API? Read on to find out.

Here's a rather scripted video from editorial director Meredith Barnett:

According to emails we've exchanged with an Inside Source representative, the site's staff is working closely with eBay's analytics team to cull information on trends. The trends examined are as broad as correlation between events and increased searches for a term (e.g., celebrity wears knee-high boots at red carpet shindig; users start looking for knee-high boots on eBay) and as narrow as data such as were used for a recent post on a Rock & Roll Hall of Fame concert:

For kicks, we decided to do a comparison of all the Hall of Famers participating in the concert series (there's a second show at MSG tonight that includes U2, Metallica, Aretha Franklin, Lenny Kravitz, Ozzy Osbourne, Lou Reed, and more) to see which names popped up most frequently on eBay over the past week.

The results were pretty fascinating: in terms of keyword searches, Metallica was far and away the most sought after band among the bunch (more than 86,000 searches!)... Second to Metallica in frequency of keyword searches was U2 (75,190), followed by Bruce Springsteen (32,690). The number of search per artist dropped off significantly from there, with but Ozzy Osbourne coming in fourth (5,290) and Sting rounded out the top five at 4,570... The supply of concert tees correlates pretty well with the demand, with the top five live listings for the concert performers and the term "shirt" as follows as of this afternoon: Metallica (1,759), Ozzy Osbourne (327), Bruce Springsteen (376), U2 (680), BB King (61).

The editorial nature of the site also puts eBay in a unique position as both a retail outlet and a recommendation source. For example, The Inside Source features a widget on the left side of the page, a thumbnail gallery of most watched items featuring auctions from around the site. Clicking the thumbnail directs the user straight to the auction page for purchase decision making. And the post we linked to above ends in a series of recommended auctions.

While it's nice to know about trending topics, the site is also definitely geared toward encouraging positive user actions - by which we mean that eBay is still directing attention in ways that will increase sales. It would be really interesting to see more of the data released in a raw, less glossy-consumer-mag-style format. Currently, eBay offers one research-focused API, powered by AERS, for retrieving pricing information for a given search term. AERS offers a suite of tools for retrieving and parsing eBay user data, as well. Their API includes calls for popular items, trends, keywords, and more.

What makes this an ingenious member engagement tool for Digg, is that sub-par articles with a high number of comments are likely to incite action. In the past, many of us simply ignored the sensationalist stories that plagued the lower echelons of Diggdom. Nevertheless, with trolls being a driving force in the determination of trends, users will find themselves clicking through simply to right the wrongs in the Digg universe. While real-time shopping notifications like Woot's Twitter account incentivize users with deals, Digg knows that its members will keep coming back to maintain a sense of justice. The company will be rolling out the trends feature in the near future.

Really?

If you're an iPhone owner yourself, you're probably going to be taken a bit aback by these findings. For example, the study claims that "cool gadgets" make a person three times more attractive to an iPhone owner than a college degree. Meanwhile "old" gadgets are a turnoff to one in three iPhone users. And yet, if that person spends a little too much time with said gadgets, one in four iPhone owners will break up with them. One in three will do it via email or text message.

Taken on their own, it's hard to say whether these stats are indicative of anything about iPhone owners specifically, or if they could apply to any group of smartphone-owning mobile users. That's why the report compares the iPhone and Blackberry owners on each topic. When studied this way, iPhone owners beat Blackberry owners in every category where "winning" is actually the equivalent of being a materialistic, flaky, fickle dolt...well, at least in our opinion.

To spin the findings even further in Blackberry's favor, one of the questions involved asking the mobile users how they "see" themselves. 40% of the iPhone owners claimed they were an "intellectual" while only 36% of Blackberry users said the same. Propped up against the other results, it's an almost laughable claim.

Don't Buy this Hype

Clearly, this survey wasn't meant to be an in-depth examination of the smartphone toting population - in fact, it's more likely just a publicity stunt to generate talk about Retrevo. Given the questions asked, there were bound to be some "rather interesting" findings, no matter how the respondents answered. And by keeping the sample size to a low number - only 445 individuals - there's no guarantee that these folks are representative of the population at large in any way. After all, who signs up for online surveys anyway? While the panel of participants was distributed across gender, age, income and location in the U.S., what's undisclosed is how the questions were asked - was this done scientifically or were they leading questions designed to generate these sorts of results?  We'd bet on the latter.

Still, you have to wonder if there isn't a tiny bit of truth hiding in these numbers somewhere. Could it be that those who buy Apple's smartphone are a little more wrapped up in mobile life than those whose smartphone purchase probably had more to do with accessing company email in a timely fashion? That may be possible, but that wouldn't exactly be an incredible reveal if so, now would it?

Among the devices making the heaviest use of the mobile web are the iPhone and its non-smartphone counterpart, the iPod Touch. The data traffic created by these two handhelds has increased 19 times from September 2008 to this past month and now accounts for 43% of all smartphone requests worldwide. In the U.S., that percentage is even slightly higher, with iPhone traffic accounting for nearly half (48%) of all smartphone requests.

Apple devices (iPhone and iPod Touch) also claim the top two spots on both the U.S. and the worldwide charts of top handsets. However, feature phones like the RAZR v3 and Samsung's R450 are still making the top ten list as well and account for 60% of ad requests in the U.S. - a figure that's likely due to the unlimited data plans available with each of these devices.

Key Takeaway #2: Watch Out! Android is Rising Fast

Now climbing up the charts, Google's Android, the newcomer to the mobile operating system game, is beginning to have an impact on mobile web traffic as well. From August to September of 2009, the percentage of smartphone traffic generated by devices running the Android OS grew a whopping 13% over the course of the month. That's a dramatic increase in such a short period of time and gives credence to recent reports that Android is poised to become the number two smartphone in the worldwide market. While still far behind the iPhone OS in terms of traffic with only 17% of U.S. traffic and only 10% of traffic worldwide, Google's mobile OS is already beating out competitors like RIM, the maker of Blackberry devices, and Windows Mobile. It has also claimed two spots on the top 10 chart of handset models in the U.S with the HTC Dream coming in at number 3 and the HTC Magic coming in at number 10. Worldwide, the Dream is also number 3, but the Magic only makes it to spot number 15.

Key Takeaway #3: Outside of U.S., Mobile Web Strong in India, Indonesia, U.K., Philippines

When looking at the number of ad requests by country, the U.S. is still dominating with 47.3% of all requests coming from the States. The next nearest country, India, only comes in at 6.5%. Rounding out the top five are Indonesia, the U.K., and the Philippines. These numbers point to heavy mobile web use in each of these countries as compared with the rest of the world.

When grouped by larger regions, North America is number one with 49.5% of requests, most of that from the U.S., and the second largest region is Asia, accounting for 25.3% of requests. Western Europe, Africa, and Latin America follow with 9.4%, 5.3% and 5.0% respectively.

Looking at just percentage increases in traffic growth, a different picture appears. Latin America is showing a large percent increase year-over-year at 0.6%, second only to North America's 1.1%. Other regions in the top five, while still accounting for large numbers of requests, actually saw slight decreases in growth (less than 0.5%) over the past year.

Smartphones are Taking Over, Mobile Web Grows

While none of the data included in this report is all that surprising, it's interesting to see actual numbers put to the reported trends. We can now see the disproportionate amount of web surfing done by iPhone users, no doubt thanks to the phone's Safari web browser, a vast improvement over the browsers included in many other mobile devices on the market.

It's also worth noting how fast Android is moving up the charts right now. It could very well be the next contender to the smartphone crown, especially given the company's plans to continue spreading its OS across numerous devices worldwide. As Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently declared, "Android adoption is about to explode." Also, AdMob noted on an earlier blog entry that there are already 12 Android phones available through 32 carriers in 26 countries. By the time they release their next Mobile Metrics report, those numbers are sure to have increased.

What all this means to the consumer is that smartphones are now edging out feature phones as the devices of choice. More phones than ever come with the advanced capabilities like touchscreens, full-featured web browsers, and Wi-Fi. With features like these, more people will begin to surf the mobile web and download mobile applications. This, in turn, will drive related changes in mobile platforms, communication, e-Commerce, and more, all of which are bound to see similar upward trends over the coming months.

According to Experian, nearly 59% of all the social networking visits were visits to Facebook while only 30% were to MySpace - a 55% decrease in market share over the past year in terms of visits for the one-time king of social networks.

Looking at just the year-over-year percent change may give you the impression that Twitter's popularity is through the roof. After all, they posted an increase of over 1000 percentage points. But the truth is, their percentage of visits still remains relatively low. Only 1.84% of visits to social networking sites in September were to Twitter, bringing them in at #4 on the chart.

What? Tagged Beats Twitter?

Facebook and MySpace beat Twitter out for the top two spots, but you may be surprised to see who came in at #3: Tagged. Yes, Tagged, the social networking site that's best known for getting busted in an email invite scam is beating out Twitter.

Although we like to think that spammy marketing tactics don't pay off, it seems that for Tagged they have. Their aggressive methods in the past involved having new registrants add their contact lists to the service which Tagged then used to send out "invites" to everyone in the user's address book. The worst part is that the invites looked as if they came from the individual users when really, most were completely unaware anything had been sent out. Tagged has also been known to send out emails that force users to sign up for accounts in order to see shared photos from other users, even going so far as to guilt-trip recipients into signing up with messages that read: "If you don't click, [the person] may think you said no :(".

As despicable as these tactics are, they've helped Tagged grow and remain profitable. ComScore reported the site had 32 million visitors in April of this year, up from 14 million the prior year. And once there, the visitors are staying engaged, generating over 5 billion pageviews during that month.

Believe it or not, the company is still growing according to the Hitwise data, albeit at a slower rate than it did a couple of years ago when it was adding more users per day than MySpace. In September of 2008, the site received 1.62% of social networking visits and this September, they received 2.38%. Although those numbers are small, they're still larger than Twitter's who came in at 0.15% last year and 1.84% this past month.

Even worse, when calculating the time spent on the social networking sites, Tagged has shown an increase there as well. They're up from 23 minutes in September of 2008 to 25 minutes in September 2009. Meanwhile, Twitter is showing a decrease from 36 minutes to just under 16 minutes year-over-year, a loss of 56%.

Although Hitwise focuses on U.S. traffic only, these findings go against everything we've heard about Twitter and its popularity - in fact, they seem to confirm that there may be more media hype surrounding the microblogging network than there is actual engagement among its users.

It would be interesting to compare the number of users each network has with the visits, but that would be hard to do since Twitter refuses to release those sorts of statistics. Meanwhile, we're left wondering if Hitwise has had some sort of massive system glitch in their system or if we've just seen proof of how Twitter's supposed popularity is just all talk.

This case had been in litigation for years, having been originally filed back in 2007. The problem stemmed from the fact that internet sites such as AutoAdmit are essentially able to operate under different rules than those that apply to TV and newspapers when it comes to libel. This is due to a law called "Section 230," which immunizes internet publishers from legal harm. At the time of its establishment in the 90's, however, those "publishers" were the ISPs themselves - the AOLs and CompuServes that delivered Internet access to consumers. The idea of bloggers, social media publishers, and anonymous blog and forum commenters didn't really exist yet and therefore wasn't taken into consideration. That meant the women weren't able to sue the operators of the discussion board website itself, but had to go after the anonymous posters instead. That, of course, was quite the challenge.

In the end, the women's attorneys were able to identify some eight or nine of the anonymous posters, according to the Hartford Courant and they settled with some of them.

Because the terms of the settlement were confidential, the lawyers representing the former students, Heide Iravani and Brittan Heller, would not discuss them. However, San Francisco attorney Ashok Ramani, whose firm, Keker & Van Nest took the case pro-bono said that their clients were "very pleased with how the case went." The women had sued for monetary damages so a settlement means they were likely awarded at least some of the amount they had hoped for.

Was the Settlement a Win or a Loss? Depends on Who You Ask

Marc Randazza, the attorney for one of the defendants scoffed that if the women's intention were to have the negative comments removed, their interests were very poorly served. "Now there's even an Encyclopedia Dramatica page for them," he told the Yale Daily News.

However, David Rosen, one of the women's attorneys and a Yale Law professor, countered that unmasking some of these anonymous posters who were hiding behind pseudonyms and then holding them accountable for what they said had accomplished "the fundamental goals of the case." He thinks the suit may even have some internet commenters thinking twice before posting. The possibility of a lawsuit "may make some people pause before posting comments that are malicious and completely indefensible," Rosen was quoted as saying.

Will This Really Change Things?

While obviously a major case, this suit isn't the first time a defamation case like this has been brought to court. In fact, only months ago, an anonymous blogger using Google's Blogger.com service was sued for rants she made about a fellow model, one Liskula Cohen, on her site "Skanks in NYC." The victim sued to reveal the identity of the malicious blogger. Thanks to a judge's ruling that Google must hand over to Cohen any identifying information they had on the site's creator, the blogger in question was revealed to be Rosemary Port. (She's now suing Google for not protecting her).

Although a slightly different case, the womens' suit involving the forum commenters also succeeded - at least in part - in revealing the identities of those posting the defamatory messages. Combined with the prior example, it will be interesting to see what impact these cases have on the online world. Will this lead to more lawsuits where alleged victims seek to out the identities of their internet foes? Will it lead to more self-policing among the commenting community? Will internet trolls actually think before they type?

It's too soon to say, but it's possible that a kinder, gentler - and possibly more boring - internet may be in our future.

PMN asked 203 panel members about their day-to-day behavior including the time they spent visiting social networks, reading and writing email, texting, talking on the phone, watching TV, reading magazines and surfing the web (visiting non-social networking sites).

When asked what activity they would be least willing to give up for an entire week, only 9% responded with "social networks." However, 26% responded "email." Another 26% said they wouldn't give up texting, although that finding is less surprising and fits in with other known behavioral traits of this particular demographic.

The report also notes that the time spent on social networks is now nearly the same as the time spent emailing. Panelists reported spending 33 hours per month on social networks and 31 hours per month on email. The difference of 2 hours per month is somewhat negligible. What's unexpected is how close those two numbers are to each other.

Questionable Findings?

According to Michael Della Penna, PMN co-founder and Executive Chairman, Gen Y finds email more critical because it remains the central hub for "social networking updates, including alerts around new followers, discussion updates and friend requests." While that may be true to a point, if the only reason Gen Y desired email access was for the social networking updates, it seems they would just go to the source instead: the social networks themselves. Given a choice between the two, it would be likely that they would have chosen to give up email and not their Facebook accounts. Something else must be going on here.

These findings also somewhat contradict a wider study done by Pew Internet and American Life earlier this year which more deeply examined how the different generations use the Internet. At that time, the study showed that email was still "for old people," so to speak, and email usage among teens had dropped from 89% in 2004 to 73% in 2009. Meanwhile, Pew also found that out of all the demographic groups surveyed, Gen Y was the most likely to use social networks.

Then last month, the Online Publishers Association revealed that web surfers' use of social networking sites like Facebook had become so rampant that it was actually causing a decline in email use.

While neither study specifically compares Gen Y's use of email against that of social networking sites, both seem to imply that email use is trending down thanks to the impact of social networking. That's why it's odd to find that one of the more "connected" generations would be quicker to abandon those social sites in favor of the more antiquated medium.

So Why Would Gen Y Give Up Facebook, but Not Email?

The answer to that question could be something as simple as how the survey question was worded. After all, the survey asked which activity they would give up for a week. Ask them again which one they could give up permanently and you may get a different answer.

Another theory is that all the hype about how Generation Y doesn't care for email is just an overblown stereotype about a demographic that, in reality, isn't all that different from the rest of us...at least when it comes to our inbox addiction.

Or perhaps Gen Y is starting to grow up a bit. Now that a large majority of them have exited their "teen" years and have entered the job market, they have begun to learn the importance of email communications. And no, they aren't just for receiving Facebook updates and friend requests. Email may now involve business-critical messages which jobs depend upon.

Finally, it could be that Gen Y has just a touch of Facebook ennui. The network, which used to be an exclusive hang out, has now been overrun by Baby Boomers and other "old folks" including bosses, parents, and sometimes even grandparents. Meanwhile, many have "aged out" of MySpace, finding themselves no longer as interested in the glittery profiles and loud music that seemed much more attractive in their high school days.

In addition, although we don't have any hard data yet, there are reports that Gen Y users are finding solace in alternative, niche social media sites like FML, Failblog, TextsFromLastNight, and Sporcle. Though not typical "social networks," these timewaster sites skew heavily towards young, college-aged adults says Carol Phillips, president of Brand Amplitude, a marketing firm that focuses heavily on the millennial demographic.

In any event, there's no need to take the PMN's study as gospel, especially given its relatively small sample set. Still, it raises the question whether this purported change in behavior deserves further study. Has Gen Y succumbed to email addiction like the rest of us? Or have they always felt this way? We hope some more in-depth research will reveal those answers in the future.

The research study was commissioned by Gomez, Inc., a company that helps organizations optimize the performance of their web and mobile applications. Obviously, that means you have to take these findings with a grain of salt as the company clearly has a vested interest in making the mobile web sound worse off than actually is.

That being said, in reading through the findings, you'll probably find yourself agreeing with much of what's being said. For example, the study found that the majority of mobile phone users said they expected sites to load as quickly, nearly as quickly, or even faster on their mobile phones as compared to their PC. While intellectually, most of us know that's not going to be the case - broadband connections at home or work are generally much faster than accessing the web via a mobile handset - there's still a feeling of wanting the phone to perform the way we've become accustomed to...that is to say, FAST. Waiting for a non-mobilized site to load up in the phone's browser reminds us too much of the painful days of dial-up connections. It feels like we've regressed to an earlier time...like there's something wrong with the site.

When encountering these slow loading sites, half of consumers reported that they were only willing to wait 6-10 seconds or less for the site to load. Longer than that, and they'll give up, move on, and probably won't ever return. Sixty-one percent said it's unlikely that they would ever visit that site again from their mobile device while another forty percent said they would seek out a competitor's site that provided a similar service.

While slow speeds were the number one complaint, with 73% reporting having issues in the past year, other complaints pointed to a lack of well-designed and stable mobile-ready sites. 51% percent complained of sites that crashed, froze, or received an error and another 48% reported the formatting of the site made it difficult to read. Clearly, there is overlap in these numbers as the survey respondents reported multiple complaints. Overall, though, 60% of mobile users reported having one or more issues accessing a site from their mobile phones.

No Mobile Web Presence is Bad for Business

For businesses who maintain a web presence, the survey's findings highlight the potential consequences of ignoring the mobile web. There are more people surfing mobile sites than ever before - 56.9 million as of July, according to Nielsen. Companies who haven't given consideration to their mobile websites aren't just losing customers for that initial attempted transaction that goes bad - they're possibly losing those customers for good seeing as how many of those frustrated users claim they won't ever return to the site in question.   

Although the survey sample size was relatively small (just 1001 total respondents) and the company behind this wants to sell web optimization services, the findings seem to be believable. Anyone who's spent a good amount of time on the mobile web can assure you that it truly is in its infancy. So many sites are slow, aren't optimized for viewing from mobile handsets, and it is frustrating when you encounter them. Hopefully, businesses will begin to realize that if they want to compete with the next generation of web surfers, a "web presence" alone isn't enough. Today, you need a "mobile web presence" too.

From an article on AdAge, which reported on Brand in Hand's news in detail, the reason that the women were not engaging with the mobile advertisements came down to how they actually used their phones. The research showed that women, "especially so-called super-moms, are task-oriented and tend to use their smartphones to help them get things done."

In other words, these busy iPhone users didn't have time to goof off by clicking (or rather, tapping) through on a mobile ad. Ads were seen only as distractions that would take them away from the particular task at hand.

For advertisers trying to market to this particular demographic, the new findings will have an impact on what type of mobile campaigns will be run in the future. And given that only 18% of women age 18-49 have a smartphone today, according to Nielsen, smartphone advertisements just won't deliver the numbers that advertisers need. At least for now.

A Better Alternative to Mobile Ads?

Although the AdAge article didn't go into any detail about how marketers could engage smartphone-owning women in different ways, we think that there's at least one company that may have figured it out. Instead of offering distracting mobile banner ads that get in the way of the task that needs to be done, food and beverage giant Kraft introduced their own iPhone app instead.

This branded effort, dubbed "iFood Assistant" (iTunes link), is a recipe app that helps users plan meals. This fits in perfectly with how Brand in Hand claim women use their smartphones - they launch apps designed for a particular purpose. Yet this time, while doing so, the women (and men, too, we suppose) are also engaging with the brand itself because the recipes featured in the iFood Assistant app include Kraft food products of course.

This app is so successful that Kraft is even able to successfully charge for it, something that rarely works for branded apps. But Kraft's app sells - and sells well - priced at 99 cents in the iTunes App Store. They even hit their 3-year download goal in a matter of weeks, said Ed Kaczmarek, Kraft Foods director of innovation. 

While at the moment, Kraft's iPhone application appears to be the exception and not the rule when it comes to creative marketing efforts, it's a great example of how mobile marketing could and perhaps should be done, especially if you want to engage busy, task-oriented women.

Piracy a Global Phenomenon

At the recent 360iDev conference, mobile analytics company Pinch Media shared some findings about piracy in the iTunes App Store. They've been tracking jailbroken devices for several months now and have started to get a handle on this previously unexamined ecosystem. According to their data, which includes 4 million jailbroken devices, 38% have at least one pirated application installed. Pinch Media says this estimate is low since pirates often take extra steps to avoid detection. Still, it's worth noting that this percentage is nowhere near being the majority of jailbreaking users. There are more people who just want extra control over their device and not an opportunity to steal apps.

They also discovered that the piracy phenomenon is not limited to any one particular market. Although piracy rates are relatively low in the U.S., the U.K. and Japan, where perhaps Apple iPhone users have more money at their disposal to spend on premium applications, piracy is a global problem. However, it does appear to be much more rampant in markets like China, Russia, Brazil and Mexico, where it's negatively correlated with per capita national GDP, notes Pinch Media.

"Try Before you Buy" - Just an Excuse to Steal?

However, the most interesting finding was the one where the "try before you buy" mentality was exposed as being a myth. Despite jailbreakers' claims that the need to "demo" an app is among their top reasons for pirating, Pinch Media found that this simply wasn't the case. To test this, they set a baseline for typical conversion rates of legitimate "lite" to paid applications and found that the conversion rate there is 7.4%. That means about 1 in 14 who try the "lite" version go on to purchase the paid version. However, among the pirate community, pirated-to-legitimate conversions are 0.43%. That's only 1 in about 233 installations. In other words, few users of pirated apps are truly "trying before they buy," they're just trying.

That being said, the pirates aren't necessarily using the pirated apps all that much. Pinch Media found that pirated apps are used less frequently than paid applications and for a shorter amount of time. They theorize that this is due to a few reasons: pirates are less attached to apps considering that they didn't pay for them, pirates often install more applications in bulk and therefore don't have much time to spend with each one and jailbroken iPhones tend to crash, leading to more frequent app uninstalls.

Although these findings may initially disappoint application developers who see piracy as contributing to lost revenue, the argument could be made - as it often is among other content-producing industries - that the people doing the pirating weren't actually going to pay for those apps anyway. They're simply sampling them because they can. While it's still a stretch to say that piracy helps developers, it's hard to really quantify how much it hurts them.