Well, it looks like Zuck might have had it right. Facebook may still be figuring out this whole monetization thing, but it is a mobile company. In fact, in the mobile app world, it's the mobile company.

Facebook Is Now The Most Popular App In The U.S. 

According to new data from comScore, Facebook leapfrogged Google Maps in October 2012 to become the most popular smartphone app in the U.S (as measured by monthly unique visitors). Of course, Apple's decision last fall to swap in its own Maps app for Google Maps in iOS 6 mostly accounts for Google's sharp drop-off. The two apps had been neck and neck in mid-2012.

Facebook's Mobile Engagement Is Insane

Facebook's app has insane levels of engagement. The Facebook app alone accounts for a whopping 23% of time spent on mobile apps, according to the comScore analysis.

Next to Facebook, Instagram clocked out with 3% of total time spent on mobile apps. Add up the time spent on Facebook's app and time spent on Instagram, and Facebook soaked up over a quarter of the total mobile engagement in the U.S. as of December 2012. Whoa.

Facebook And Google Duke It Out

As of December, Facebook has its claws deep in position one, but Google is crowding the rest of the competition out. Google products account for the second through sixth most popular mobile apps across iOS and Android (Yahoo! Messenger, bafflingly, is #10).

Considering that Facebook just rebuilt its Android and iPhone apps, it should feel pretty good to be king. As its bevy of slick apps in top spots shows, Google lives and breathes mobile. But Facebook is just now figuring things out, shifting its weight toward mobile strategy and revamping its notoriously wonky apps in the latter half of 2012. 

What will happen as Google Maps, now back in the App Store, marches up toward the top slot is anyone's guess. Facebook will sit pretty as the reigning king of mobile in the meantime - and even Google can't approach the epic levels of mobile engagement inspired by the biggest social network in the world.

New analytics from AppData suggest that Instagram is hemorrhaging members after last week's backlash against its changing terms of use. Some sites are reporting that Instagram has actually lost 25% of its daily active users as a result of the incident, which had Instagram enthusiasts and the Facebook-wary alike hoisting their pitchforks in protest. 

The New York Post reports:

"The app, which Facebook acquired for $1 billion earlier this year, may have shed nearly a quarter of its daily active users in the wake of the debacle, according to figures from AppData."

While Instagram wasn't willing to divulge statistics to the contrary when we reached out for comment, it did dismiss the AppData numbers altogether. According to a company representative, "This data is inaccurate. We continue to see strong and steady growth in both registered and active users of Instagram."

But in light of Instagram's nimble PR recovery and a host of other uncontrolled variables, the 25% figure is just an bad read on some out-of-context statistics. Here's why.

AppData's Imperfect Instagram Sample 

For starters, AppData's numbers only reflect the behavior of Instagram users who have tied their accounts to Facebook. According to AppData's disclaimer, "only users who connect to the app using Facebook are included in the active user counts." This April, that accounted for a 20% sample of Instagram's total user base, up from 15% in 2011.

While 20% is by no means small, it represents Instagram users' behavior in relation to Facebook. Considering that the blow-up last week revolved around Facebook's mobile advertising plans, that's a big variable. Instagram loyalists are happy to blame Facebook for any of the app's missteps anyway, and it's possible that the whole ordeal had users snipping their Facebook ties rather than jumping ship altogether. Instagram users who connect through Facebook are arguably the most volatile subgroup of its over 100 million users. 

Blame The Holidays, Not The Backlash

Interestingly, according to AppData, Instagram's numbers actually remained level during the ToS debacle, which began unfolding on Dec. 17 and reached a fever pitch the next day. Instagram co-founder and CEO Kevin Systrom apologized and rolled back the proposed policy change on Dec. 20. Instagram actually saw an increase in DAU from 16.2 million to 16.4 million between Dec. 18 and 19. The decline to 12.4 million began on Dec. 23, which began to sink from a baseline of 15.7 million, with a sharper drop on Christmas Eve.

Compared to the apparent effect of the Christmas holiday, Instagram's ToS kerfuffle appears to have had little measurable impact on AppData's numbers. And according to the data, monthly active use numbers are up 600,000 today from yesterday. Weekly active users are up 29.4 million today from 28.5 on Dec. 27.

A Complicated Year For Instagram

The holiday 2011 season was good to Instagram, though those were considerably simpler times. Last year around this time, Instagram saw explosive growth as both iPhone 4S activations and its new title as Apple's official "iPhone App of the Year" fueled its trend to the top. As CEO Kevin Systrom told Gigagom: "Coupled with being iPhone App of the Year – new activations of iPhones on Christmas definitely gave Instagram a bump, though we’re not releasing publicly how much of a bump. Sorry I can’t be more specific, but things are going well!" 

As Buzzfeed suggests, to really examine the fallout of Instagram's policy debacle, one would be better served to look at Flickr's numbers from last week (we requested as much from Yahoo! last week but received a link to a company blog post instead). But even if Flickr saw a spike in growth, the two services aren't mutually exclusive. Not to mention that Instagram can add new users faster than it might lose old ones. 

Shares of Facebook stock were down 1.46% percent this morning, opening at $25.29 before inching upward over the course of the day. While this year has seen more ups and downs for the hit photo sharing app - from its billion dollar acquisition to its ever-increasing user numbers - it's still overwhelmingly on the up and up. 

Most unemployed Americans have only a few options. Most spend their days applying for jobs, not just because they need the opportunity to work and earn a living, but also because job searching is a prerequisite for collecting unemployment compensation.

Get a Job - or Start a Business?

But thanks to Senator Ron Wyden (D - Ore.) and several other U.S. senators, Americans in some states have another option. Self-Employment Assistance (SEA), a provision in the Middle Class Tax Relief and Job Creation Act of 2012, legislation passed by Congress and signed by President Barack Obama in February, allows the states to “empower unemployed workers to start their own businesses.”

Although the U.S. Department of Labor just announced that $35 million in funds were available to “develop, enhance and promote SEA programs in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands,” five states - Delaware, Maine, New Jersey, New York, and Oregon - already have active SEA programs.

To entrepreneurial types this seems like a no-brainer. Scott Gerber - ReadWriteWeb contributor, founder and president of the Young Entrepreneur Council, and a leader in the movement to #Fix Young America (Senator Wyden, in fact, wrote a chapter in Gerber’s #Fix Young America book addressing this topic) - says SEA is “just common sense… and a simple realization of the new reality of the startup economy.”

Big Government - or Small Business?

There are, of course, those who say SEA won’t work, that it’s just another “big government” program. Gerber counters that argument this way: “Government can’t cure all woes. But there are certain things the government can do, like remove barriers." More to the point, he continues, "It’s obvious that long-term unemployment solutions like sending resumes isn’t working.”

Actually there’s more fodder to support SEA, which isn’t exactly a new idea. Wyden first wrote legislation to “empower states to provide unemployment compensation to individuals for the purpose of funding self-employment” back in 1985.

And just a few years later - in the early 1990s - two demonstration projects (allowing people to start businesses with their unemployment benefits) were created in Massachusetts and Washington state. The results? Researchers concluded SEA projects “increased the likelihood of self-employment and the amount of time participants were employed.”

Additional research looked at SEA programs established in the late 1990s in Maine, New Jersey and New York. That study showed SEA participants “were 19 times more likely than non-participants to be self-employed at any point after their period of unemployment, and were four times more likely to have obtained any type of employment.”

There’s more. Oregon has been operating an SEA program since 1995, and a survey shows nearly half of its program’s participants have created an average of 3.12 new jobs. SEA programs, says Senator Wyden, turn unemployment insurance into “job multipliers.”

Who Qualifies?

You can’t just say you’re starting a business to qualify for the SEA program. Those eligible to collect unemployment must have a “viable business plan” and “be working full-time” to launch “a sustainable business.” If you qualify, you will be able to collect your unemployment benefits for a maximum of 26 weeks, even though you are not searching for full-time employment.

To further help startup entrepreneurs, the Department of Labor is calling on the resources of the Small Business Administration, SCORE and the Small Business Development Centers to provide technical assistance and training in the participating states.

To some startups an unemployment check may seem too small and trivial to make a difference. But during startup, every dollar counts. And as Gerber says, “A lot of little somethings will help move the economy forward.”

The White House and the Department of Labor want to encourage other states to adopt SEA as soon as possible. States must apply for the grants by June 30, 2013.

One of the most interesting statistics in Mary Meeker's Internet Trends presentation was that in India, the world's second largest Internet market, the Mobile Web surpassed the Desktop Web during May 2012. A closer analysis reveals that a) mobile only passed desktop during weekends; and b) India's mobile stats are vastly different from any other country's. The global average is only 10% mobile traffic, so has India's mobile traffic been miscounted?

The extraordinary graph above, from Meeker's slides and sourced from web traffic monitoring company Statcounter, shows that mobile Internet traffic in India was almost zero in 2009 and the Desktop Internet close to 100%. Just three short years later, mobile traffic edged past desktop traffic. Or at least it did during parts of May 2012.

It turns out you can check these statistics for yourself, on the Statcounter Global Stats website. This shows that although mobile traffic may have surpassed desktop traffic in India on some days during May, on average desktop traffic was still slightly ahead: 51.29% desktop vs. 48.71% mobile.

The daily traffic graph for India in May reveals that mobile Internet overtook desktop only during the weekends. As a Statcounter representative put it, "mobile browsing peaks at weekends, while desktop browsing is more popular during the working week."

Incidentally, while it's a bit harder to spot the trend in the following graph, U.S. daily data also shows upward bumps every weekend. So the mobile = weekend trend appears to be a global one.

Why Are India's Stats So Different To Other Countries?

The main mystery is why India's mobile traffic statistics are so different from other countries, since the global mobile traffic average is only 10%.

In Japan, which has traditionally been ahead of the curve in mobile, traffic from mobile devices only accounts for 6.4% of its total traffic. In China, it's 4.18%. In the entire continent of Africa, where mobile phone technology is widely used, it's 12.96% (the trend line there has actually dipped in 2012, from a high of 19.17% in January). Meanwhile in the United States, the home of the world's most popular smartphone operating systems iOS and Android, mobile traffic is 9.13% (see graph below).

Faulty Stats?

There has been some suggestion from within India that these statistics aren't representative.

The argument is that Statcounter's data is over-represented by mobile Internet early adopters in India. On its Twitter account, Statcounter responded that it tracks over 900 million page views from Indian IPs per month. While it admits that this is only a sampling of total India traffic, Statcounter insists that it is "a large enough statistical sample [to] approximate the real population."

What's Behind The Mobile Growth in India?

While I think Statcounter's data may be a little suspect, I do agree that 900 million is a significant enough sampling to show the trend. Which leads us to question what is behind that trend; and should we pay it much heed?

One answer is from another slide from Mary Meeker, which showed that 3G subscriptions in India grew by 841% over the past year. India now has 39 million 3G subscribers, up from 4 million a year ago. It should be noted that India still trails the U.S., which has 208 million 3G subscribers, by quite a margin. The difference is that India has a much lower market penetration for mobile than the U.S. (4% in India, 64% in the U.S.).

It's also likely that mobile Internet is more cost efficient and convenient than desktop in many parts of India.

The bottom line is that India is still a very young market for mobile Internet. So readers in more mature mobile markets, like the U.S. and Japan, shouldn't read too much into the India stats. One thing is for sure though, mobile traffic is increasing fast in most countries in the world. Of that statistic, there is no doubt.

Today at the D10 Conference, star analyst Mary Meeker gave her latest presentation of Internet Trends. You can download the presentation here (PDF), or view it at the bottom of this post. It's well worth spending time perusing the whole presentation, but here are the main takeaways. Get ready for lots of re-imagining and proof of rapid growth!

Meeker has been obsessed with mobile growth in recent presentations - and that trend continues. The executive summary of her latest report is that mobile technology is being rapidly adopted, but it's "still in [the] early stages." Meanwhile, Internet growth in general is described as "robust."

Mobile devices are, unsurprisingly, the biggest growth area. The standout statistic was this: 29% of USA adults now own a tablet or eReader, up from 2% less than three years ago. That's been fueled by the rapid growth of devices like the iPad and Kindle.

Mobile adoption is having a big impact on overall Web traffic. Global mobile traffic is "growing rapidly" and is now 10% of Internet Traffic.

The following is a very sobering stat for Facebook. It's as good an explanation as any for why Facebook spent $1 billion on Instagram. In India, the world's second largest Internet market behind China, mobile Internet traffic has now surpassed desktop Internet traffic!

Back to the US, the combined growth of mobile devices and mobile traffic has resulted in a big jump in mobile revenue. However, most of it (71%) is revenue from apps. 29% is from mobile advertising.

Overall, Meeker is bullish on mobile monetization. The desktop Internet proved that advertising dollars follow eyeballs, Meeker said, so it's just a matter of time before mobile attracts dollars. She points to the strong mobile app revenue figures, as well as "rapid growth" (that phrase again) of mobile commerce and associated payment systems.

"Re-Imagination" is a new catchphrase that Meeker introduced in this presentation. The first generation of Re-Imagination was the desktop Internet usurping old business models. For example the newspaper industry, where print ad revenue was surpassed by Internet revenue in 2010.

She then presented a slew of examples of how (mostly mobile) technology is "re-imagining nearly everything." Here are just a few of them:

Lots to digest in this excellent presentation by Mary Meeker, who has more than proven herself to be the standout analyst of this Internet era.

94% of American wineries surveyed by ABLE Social Media Marketing are on Facebook and 73% are on Twitter. The study, done in December 2011, shows that American wineries are active in social media and that it's producing results. 47% of US wineries said that Facebook helps them generate sales (72% sell wine on their website). While this study focuses on wineries only, companies in other industries should take note of these results.

The study by ABLE covered both American and French wineries, but the French statistics aren't as impressive. For example only 53% of French wineries surveyed are on Facebook, compared to 94% of US wineries.

Facebook and/or Twitter?

Drilling down into the Facebook statistics some more, 50% of American wineries (but only 18% of French wineries) have more than 500 fans on Facebook. ABLE identified two reasons for the success of American wineries on Facebook:

• 49% of American wineries (19% of French) have a dedicated marketing manager who creates and publishes content on social networks.
• 30% of American wineries have been using Facebook ads to promote their winery (only 7.6% of French wineries).

Aside: 3.8% of American wineries listed "my children" as their Facebook managers. Goes to show that family ties in SMB's is still important!

It's interesting to see the wine industry using Facebook and Twitter for different reasons. According to the study, Facebook is the superior social media platform for generating sales (48% for Facebook vs. 28% for Twitter). But Twitter is seen as better at capturing media attention (53% for Twitter vs. 32% for Facebook). That kind of statistic is good news for Facebook's IPO investors, who've been spooked by the media into thinking that Facebook will have trouble growing revenue.

72% of American wineries and 69% of French wineries say they will be increasing their activity on Facebook in 2012. Twitter isn't seen as so important, with 61% of American wineries and 45% of French wineries saying they will increase their activity on Twitter in 2012.

Other Social Networks

Another interesting statistic is which wine-focused social networks US wineries use. Snooth is the most popular, with 33% of respondents on there.

Note that nearly 53% aren't on any niche wine network. I'm somewhat surprised by that, because I'm a user of a couple of wine apps - Snooth and Drync - and I'd like to think that wineries are active on them. They should be updating their data on the popular apps and trying to woo the most passionate wine consumers (because connoisseurs are more likely to be using these niche apps than other people).

As for other types of social networks, nearly 54% of American wineries have claimed or created a profile on Yelp, 40% on Google Places and 30% on Foursquare.

285 American wineries and 243 French ones participated in the study. The full report is embedded below.

Prior to the library, getting things out of the Google Analytics API wasn't a trivial process. According to the post announcing the feature, developers had to learn the API, then figure out how to handle authorization, and then meld the data with another visualization library. Fun for some developers, but definitely not speedy. And when has management ever said "we'd really like a better dashboard for our Web traffic, but take as long as you like to come up with it"? Right, so something better was obviously needed.

The Easy Dashboard Library

Google worked with students at the University of California, Irvine to come up with something better. The Easy Dashboard Library has three basic steps: Set up API access with an OAuth 2.0 client ID; copy and paste some code; and configure the code to query data and select your chart type.

The post from Google demonstrates how to create a quick-and-dirty chart for pageviews, visits and visitors over the last 30 days. You can test out a demo on Google Code, where the library lives.

Developers have the option of using line, bar, pie, table or column charts. The demo shows a pretty simple query, but developers can set queries using all kinds of dimensions and metrics supported by the Core Reporting API. It looks like developers can also use the data with another chart API if they prefer.

If you still don't think it's quite easy enough to use or would like to see additional features, you may be in luck. Google is planning to work with another group of students at the university for the next three quarters. The main goal is simplifying the library, but Google is also encouraging feedback via the Google Group for the Easy Dashboard Library.

Given the prevalence of Google Analytics, this should be good news for a lot of developers. It should also make custom dashboards more accessible even to more casual users, who might not have been eager to spend the time needed to get up to speed with the Analytics API but can ramp up pretty quickly with the Easy Dashboard Library. If you've taken a stab at using it, or have any recommendations for working with Analytics data, let us know in the comments.

This is not a classic free API platform though. ESPN is owned by ABC, which is owned by Disney. Disney is not known for sharing nicely. Developers can use ESPN's headlines API for free but otherwise have to form a brand partnership with the sports giant. Yet, considering ESPN's prowess and well of rich data, that may not be a bad thing.

ESPN's APIs

There are six APIs in ESPN's new developer center. The only one that does not require a premium partnership with the network is the headlines API that allows developers to grab content from the company covering sports and athletes. The other five can only be used by ESPN "premium partners" or the network itself.

There are a lot of things to like in those five APIs. One of the great strengths of ESPN is the ability to track sports information in real time and store it in a database. For instance, if you have ever followed a sports game from your mobile device or computer, ESPN's "GameCenter" application is one of the marvels of modern sports reporting. Individual leagues track their own games such as similar services from the MLB, NHL, NFL and NBA but the difference between other leagues and ESPN is that the network tracks every game, everywhere. Looking up to the second updates on yesterday's Creighton vs. Illinois State game? GameCenter has it in almost real-time. The other large sports networks can do this as well (such as Yahoo and CBS Sports) but when it comes to data and developers, ESPN is winning the race.

Here are the benefits of the six APIs with descriptions from ESPN:

• Athletes: "Allows you to get rosters of players for various sports, as well as biographical and statistical data for individual athletes."
• Research Notes: "Allows you to tap into ESPN's vast knowledgebase of exclusive sports data tidbits compiled by our Stats and Information Group. Research Notes are available by sport, athlete, team, and even game."
• Standings: "Enables you to get the latest standings for a particular sport by division, conference, or overall. Data is also available by year and by season type (preseason, regular season, playoffs)."
• Headlines: "Allows you to interact with ESPN's various news stories. ESPN publishes hundreds of unique pieces of text content each day, covering dozens of sports and hundreds of athletes and teams."
• Scores & Schedules: "Provides game/match information, including start times, venue, competitors, score, and stats across every major sport."
• Teams: "Enables you to get information, including roster, stats, and more, for individual teams. You can also fetch teams by conference or division."

What can be Built?

ESPN showcases a couple stalwart applications that use its APIs such as Flipboard and Pulse. It also shows the Brigham Young Cougars app that leverages the scores API to keep track of all things BYU. Foursquare uses the schedule and research APIs to check into sporting events. There are so many more useful functions for these APIs than just news readers and specific teams.

For instance, fantasy sports gurus could tap into ESPN's data to provide real-time insight and analysis to their apps. Trivia apps can get almost any sports answer in a matter of seconds. Niche sports sites can provide rich data on matchups and schedules and locations. For instance, the Colonial Athletic Association (CAA) is having its basketball championship tonight. Tapping into ESPN data can provide readers better context into a league that is otherwise overlooked by those not associated with it.

ESPN also has an advanced statistics group that crunches numbers and gives the biggest stat heads all the information and context they can consume. Being a baseball fan that analyzes advanced stats, it would be helpful to me if a developer took the raw data out of ESPN and created visualizations and dynamic charts. There are other sources on the Web where this information is available but to my knowledge none of them release it as an easy to use API.

Working With ESPN

This is where it gets tricky. ESPN wants you to have this data ... it just does not want you to profit from it. That is reasonable considering it is ESPN's data. Opening up this data as a platform is a way for the company to brand itself across multiple applications. It is important to read the fine print.

Developers cannot advertise in an application that uses ESPN APIs except through specific network approved ads. Presumably ESPN would split revenues with developers from those apps but the terms of service make no specific mention of sharing.

"ESPN may make available to you a Tool or other API that permits you to include ESPN-approved advertising in your Apps. Unless otherwise set forth in the Information Form or on a separate "Advertising Addendum," you may not include any advertising or sponsorship in your App (unless included in the Content made available by ESPN)."

ESPN is not Facebook. When Facebook opened its platform in 2007 is was a revelation on how a platform can open itself to be built upon and let everybody grow and prosper. Facebook created the blueprint for what it takes to create a successful developer program and platform. As for as open platforms go, ESPN's developer program is one of the most closed systems of rich data that we have seen. Essentially the network is saying, "here is out data but play by our rules and make sure we get all the credit for everything you do." While the API may be an enlightened idea from a sports network, its terms are not.

The answer to the first question, by the way, is Adele, who gained 175,000 followers over the last 24 hours (at time of writing). Adele's popularity on Facebook is mainly due to her female fans; 62% are female and 38% male. The fastest growing TV show is Mob Wives, perhaps thanks to the current "swear jar sweepstakes" promotion on its Facebook Page. This type of data is useful, albeit limited at this point.

A sister site called Likes Matter offers a real-time view of Facebook Page growth rates. There I discovered that Eminem's Facebook Page is currently attracting about 35-40 new likes every minute.

The main site, the awkwardly named SocialMedia-live, updates Facebook Page data on 90,000 "big players" every 10 minutes - including Eminem, Coca Cola, YouTube and other very popular brands. A further 1.8 million "medium-sized pages" are updated every 12 hours. The other 36 million or so "little pages" are refreshed every 5 days.

There's a special page for "Hip Fanpages," those Facebook Pages "that have distinguished themselves in terms of layout, navigational ease, interactive fanpage features, etc." Current members include Adidas Originals, Snooki, Livestrong, Star Wars and a German comedian named Linda P. That last pick is a clue that SocialMedia-live hails from Germany.

There are some useful comparison tools, too. Below is a chart comparing the growth of Adele, Jennifer Lopez and Katy Perry over the past 90 days. We can see that the popularity of Adele's Facebook Page spiked in January of this year. She has about 12.6 million fans at time of writing. Meanwhile Lopez is growing faster than Perry. Although note that Perry has more fans than Adele and Lopez combined. She has 37.6 million fans, while Lopez has 8 million. A likely explanation is that Perry is much nearer to peak popularity on Facebook than either Adele or Lopez. Growth rate could also be affected by when the fan pages were started. So, as always, take these statistics with a grain of the proverbial salt.

The big thing missing from SocialMedia-live is search. I could find no way to get statistics about our own ReadWriteWeb Facebook Page, for example. There also seems to be no easy access to the 36 million or so "little pages." Both of those issues severely limits the usefulness of the site for marketers, who would be a prime audience for this data.

But this is a beta site, so we hope it will expand over time. For now, if you're interested in finding out how fast certain brands are growing their Facebook Page fan bases, then SocialMedia-live offers an interesting set of statistics.

Of the non-computer traffic, much of it comes from Netflix (on TVs), Facebook and YouTube (both mostly on mobile devices).

Real-Time Entertainment is defined in the report as "applications and protocols that allow "on-demand" entertainment that is consumed (viewed or heard) as it arrives." Examples given include Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, Spotify, Rdio, Pandora and Slingbox.

Looking first at overall traffic - which includes both computers and other devices - real-time entertainment accounts for 60% of peak downstream Internet traffic in North America. There's been a steady increase in this figure over the past few years. It was 50% in Sandvine's March 2011 report, 42% in 2010 and just under 30% in 2009.

Netflix alone accounts for 32.7% of total peak downstream traffic in Sandvine's latest report, a relative increase of more than 10% since U.S. spring. YouTube accounts for 11.3% of peak traffic.

Post-PC Habits

The report notes that people are watching real-time entertainment on an increasing number of screens - including smartphones, tablets and "a TV with direct (smart TVs) or indirect (via a game console or set-top) Internet connectivity."

Interestingly, the report states that when people watch online video, "they generally choose to watch content on the largest screen available to them." So they will choose a TV over a computer, a tablet over a smartphone, and a smartphone over nothing at all. What's more, screen size has direct correlation to data usage:

"For example, when watching a video on a 60-inch HD capable plasma screen, most subscribers will opt for the highest video fidelity available. In that same scenario, higher- quality audio might also be provided to the home theatre system."

What's behind the increase of consumption of real-time entertainment on devices other than computers? Sandvine claims it is mainly due to game consoles, "through manufacturers partnering with content producers." As an example, it cites this month's announcement by Microsoft of "a massive expansion in the list of content providers that will be available on the Xbox 360, including such heavyweights as Bravo, Comcast, HBO, BBC, Telefonica, Rogers on Demand and Televisa."

Mobile Devices

Looking specifically at mobile devices (which effectively means smartphones), Sandvine reports that real-time entertainment generates 30.8% of peak demand on mobile. Web browsing is next, on 27.3%, while social networking is 20.0%. Most of the latter comes from Facebook, which represents 19.3% of peak mobile traffic. YouTube gets 18.2%.

These statistics correlate with other data that we've been hearing. For instance, in September Google announced that mobile devices are responsible for 10% of all YouTube downloads. Mary Meeker's Web 2.0 Summit presentation attributed 33% of Facebook traffic to mobile devices. Meeker also pointed to Pandora and Twitter, which have 60% and 55% respectively of their traffic going to mobile devices.

Slide from Mary Meeker's 2011 report

These statistics from Sandvine, backed up by Mary Meeker's data, clearly show that devices other than computers are not only having a big impact on consumption of real-time entertainment - they're now the primary way to consume such content.

Let us know in the comments about your own usage patterns for consuming real-time entertainment on the Web. Are you finding that most of that is through a connected TV, mobile device or tablet?

This time last year, we compared the growth of the two leading light blogging services: Tumblr and Posterous. The conclusion was that Tumblr had all but defeated its rival. All through 2010, Tumblr showed exponential growth. That has continued into 2011. Over the past year, Tumblr has grown from just over 100 million visits per month to over 300 million now (according to Quantcast). Over the same period, Posterous has grown from about 7M visits per month to about 11M. So the gap has widened: a year ago Tumblr got 14-15 times more visits per month, now it's double that.

Tumblr is now so popular that its founder got invited to The White House and its logo acquired a fish jumping through it. Tumblr is also getting 12 billion page views per month, an estimated 8 times more than Wordpress.com.

Tumblr vs. Posterous, in visits per month. It's no contest now.

A better comparison these days is between Tumblr and Wordpress.com, the leading full blogging platform. While Wordpress.com still gets more visits (but not page views, as we'll see below), Tumblr is drawing ever closer.

Tumblr vs. Wordpress.com, in visits per month.

The two services offer different things, so this is somewhat of an apples and oranges comparison. Wordpress.com is a fully-fledged hosted blogging platform, while Tumblr is a light blogging and curation service. I myself use both products. However, both are blogging services and so it's worth comparing the statistics.

At the end of last year we estimated that Wordpress.com was larger than Tumblr in terms of unique visitors and number of bloggers. However we noted that Tumblr had about twice the number of page views per month.

On the page view front at least, Tumblr has exploded in recent months. Quantcast puts it at 12 billion per month currently, compared to 1.4B for Wordpress.com. So Tumblr now gets 8.5 times more page views per month than Wordpress.com (at least according to Quantcast, which in my experience tends to be the most accurate public web statistics tool).

Before we get too excited, we should remember that Facebook is still a blue whale compared to both Tumblr and Wordpress.com. Quantcast has Facebook at 7.4 billion visits per month in the U.S. alone.

What's the upshot of all this? Maybe just that Tumblr has scaled incredibly well and shows no signs of slowing down. Wordpress.com hasn't had the same exponential growth, but it's certainly been no slouch either. Both services are enormously popular and many people use them side by side.

Let us know your thoughts on Tumblr compared to Wordpress.com in the comments. Should Wordpress.com be worried?

As one participant in Latitude's study noted, traditionally gamers have been thought of as the "stereotypical, petulant and portly adult playing a viscerally violent game in his parents' basement." According to the report findings, that stereotype of the anti-social, immature gamer is outdated. Today's gamer is "social, tech-savvy, goal-oriented" and is much more social than they're usually given credit for. For example, 84% of the study participants use social media "at least several times per week."

The findings come from a Web survey amongst 290 smartphone owners between the ages of 15-54 who self-identified as at least "casual gamers," with nearly half labeling themselves "game enthusiasts." This infographic from Latitude summarizes the findings:

Click here to view large image.

The following visualization answers this question: How Would You Like to Interact with Games in the Future? Gesteral systems, such as Microsoft's motion-controlled gaming system Kinect, is the most popular request.

This visualization asks: Where Would You Like to See More Games Applied? Education and healthcare were the two most popular answers.

Finally, check out this video analysis of the findings:

For other research on gaming demographics and usage, see these ReadWriteWeb posts from earlier this year:

• Mobile Gaming Audience is Younger, Has Strong Female Presence
• Gaming and Entertainment Dominating Mobile Usage [Infographic]
• Do Video Game Developers Ignore Women Gamers?

When I first started at ReadWriteWeb, the updates to Facebook were automatically posted via a Facebook application. It was an easy way to make sure our fans got to see our posts, but it didn't foster community discussions so after I got my bearings around here, I stopped the app (or at least I thought I did).

I began to publish each of our posts to Facebook manually. I'd make sure an image was used when applicable and add a summary statement to the wall summary. When all was said and done, I ended up posting 27 posts before a kind, but overwhelmed, fan let us know he was getting duplicates. The app was still publishing on top of my posts.

I'm a glass-is-half-full kind of gal, so rather than stress about the accident, I decided to look at this as an opportunity to compare apples-to-apples and determine which was better, auto-posted or manually posted items on Facebook.

As you'd probably guess, I found that automated posts saw significantly less views on Facebook. An auto-posted story that received x views on Facebook would receive, on average, 2.5x views on Facebook when published manually. Because more people saw the manually posted stories, their engagement was roughly doubled (likes and comments).

This does compare apples-to-apples because these were the exact same stories. The auto-posted content was posted first, within minutes of posting to our blog. To make sure that the data was representative, I went back a month and looked at average views, likes and comments and the auto-posted content's stats during this period is almost exactly in line with previous months' performance.

My assumptive explanation for this behavior is EdgeRank. EdgeRank is the algorithm that Facebook uses to determine where a post shows up in a user's stream. It seems to push content that gets reactions higher up the stream. I'm not sure if my manually posted entries got a better reaction because I worked hard to craft a pithy call-to-action on them (thereby moving them up in EdgeRank) or if some other secret sauce caused them to move up in EdgeRank, which in turn gave them more reactions.

Whatever the cause, the manually posted entries saw more than double the views and a little more than double the engagement. We did eventually get the app completely turned off and I posted the remainder of the month's stories to Facebook manually. This again showed a definite increase in traffic back to our site from Facebook (nearly double).

Manual posting is a chore. What takes the app seconds to post may take me 10 minutes. And, because I am not continually at the computer, some of our content isn't posted immediately after posting. There are definitely cons to manual posting, but the increase in engagement and page views back to our site is worth the additional labor.

Have you tested your Facebook posting methods? I'd be interested in learning if this obvious increase in performance was the same across other sectors.

For the last two weeks, it seems like anything anyone can talk about is the fact that our GPS-enabled smartphones are tracking our location. First, it was the iPhone, then the Android and finally Windows Phone 7. Why has this struck such a chord?

According to a study by TRUSTe, a leading Internet privacy service provider, privacy is the leading concern for smartphone users, with security following close behind.

Although some may point to 15,200-word terms of service, privacy comes down to more than a legal contract, it comes down to user expectation and, in this case, it seems that users did not expect that their smartphones were not only tracking them, but also sending the data back to Google's, Apple's and Microsoft's servers.

TRUSTe's survey points out why this story erupted so quickly. The survey, conducted in 2011, "revealed a strikingly high level of concern around personal information and data privacy," the company writes.

Privacy concerns weren't only the primary concern stated by respondents, but 77% said that they don't want to share their location with app owners and developers. Beyond that, 85% of respondents said that they were uncomfortable with advertiser tracking. If 77% of respondents don't want to knowingly share their location with apps

ReadWriteWeb's Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote about a study last week that had similar findings. According to that study, published by Portland, Oregon digital marketing firm White Horse, 56% of smartphone owners surveyed said they knew about location-based services and 39% of respondents said they used them.

When it comes to predicting the future, we don't need a crystal ball anymore. These days, we just need to look at how people act online - what they share with their friends on Facebook and Twitter - to predict things like box office success or the stock market.

With that in mind, we're here to see if some social media statistics and science can help us call some Oscar winners a couple days early.

If you glance up on this page a couple inches, you'll see the AddThis button. AddThis is one of the leading link-sharing services on the Web and sees over 1 billion unique visitors monthly from more than 8 million sites. Parent company Clearspring has leveraged this popularity to gather some data and show what films, actors and actresses are getting the most buzz in the month leading up to the Oscar Awards.

First, a little background. About six months back, HP Lab's Bernardo Huberman released a study titled "Predicting the Future with Social Media." According to Huberman, "social media content can be used to predict real-world outcomes."

"We use the chatter from Twitter.com to forecast box-office revenues for movies," wrote Huberman in the study's introduction. "We show that a simple model built from the rate at which tweets are created about particular topics can outperform market-based predictors. We further demonstrate how sentiments extracted from Twitter can be further utilized to improve the forecasting power of social media."

Let's look at the most recent buzz, according to Clearspring:

If we look at this alone, the obvious conclusion would be that Jesse Eisenberg is going to run away with the award for Best Actor, but his recent appearance on Saturday Night Live might be something to keep in mind. Let's take a look at what movies have been lighting up the Internet.

It looks like "Black Swan" with Natalie Portman is well ahead of Jesse Eisenberg's "The Social Network." And if we consider the fact that "127 Hours," which features James Franco, is in second place for movies, we might instead choose Franco for Best Actor.

What do you think? Can social media mentions predict the outcome of this weekend's Oscar Awards? Will Franco and Portman take it away, with Black Swan leaving with Best Picture? Or are the graphs telling the truth and showing a landslide vote for Jesse Eisenberg?

When you think of Twitter and influence, you might think that the most obvious metric used to measure would be the number of followers a user has. Time and again, influence on Twitter has been shown to be not a direct function of how many followers one has, but a number of other factors.

One of those factors, according to a report by HP, may be just as obvious as follower numbers: long-standing status as a source of information and news. Having millions upon millions of followers may be fun, but it doesn't set the Trending Topics.

"Who gets to determine the big topics of conversation on social media? And how do they do it?" writes Ethan Bauley, managing editor of HP's Data Central blog.

According to Bernardo Huberman, director of HP Lab's Social Computing Research Group, it isn't the "most prolific tweeters or those with most followers" as you might expect.

"We found that mainstream media play a role in most trending topics and actually act as feeders of these trends," said Huberman. "Twitter users then seem to be acting more as filter and amplifier of traditional media in most cases."

According to Huberman's report, there are 22 Twitter users who dominate the Twitter Trending Topics. Bauley describes a bit of the work behind the report and its findings:

The HP team collected data from Twitter's own search API over a period of 40 days in the fall of 2010.  From the resulting sample of 16.32 million tweets, they identified 22 users who were the source of the most retweets when a topic was "trending."  Of those 22, 72% were Twitter streams run by mainstream media outfits such as CNN, the New York Times, El Pais and theBBC.

Although popular, most of these sites have millions of followers fewer than highly followed tweeters such as Ashton Kutcher, Barack Obama or Lady Gaga.

Similarly, the research showed that just having an active Twitter account was not a factor in creating a trend.

What were these 22 accounts? Take a look.

For the intellectually curious, the report is embedded blow in its entirety.

Over the last year, Facebook has become increasingly dominant in terms of being used as the user identity and login on third-party sites. Last summer, we reported that Facebook had dominated as the third-party login of choice, surpassing sites like Twitter, Google and Yahoo in all realms but one - news. News sites saw users logging in almost twice as often using Twitter.

Now, it looks like another site is gaining ground in another realm. Career-centric social network LinkedIn is growing as the login of choice for business-to-business (B2B) sites, proving once again that users prefer certain identities for certain online activities.

Gigya, a provider of tools for social sharing and third-party logins, took a look at the numbers and found that, since its last round-up of social logins in July 2010, LinkedIn has skyrocketed as the login of choice for B2B sites. According to Rachel Peterson, a spokesperson for the company, LinkedIn has seen increased use as a third-party login ever since it updated its profile API. The site has seen an increase from 3% to 20% in just over six months.

"LinkedIn has a strong case that a single social graph through Facebook is not sufficient," said Peterson. "Professionals want to apply different profile data to business oriented sites and share that content with a different group of people than their FB friends."

So, if you're thinking of taking  your site the way of eHow and forsaking all other logins for the one, true Facebook login, you might want to take a gander at the following graphic and see where your visitors lie. Maybe you should be working on that LinkedIn presence a bit more and Facebook a bit less.

Just in case you haven't been paying attention, yesterday was national "Let's Willingly Watch TV Commercials" day. Some people also call it Super Bowl Sunday. More than 100 million people tuned in yesterday to watch the annual handegg championship match, guffaw at TV commercials and tweet about the experience.

So, the big question then is who won? No, not the Packers, silly. We're talking about ads and their impact online. Who got the most mentions on Twitter? TweetReach, a Tweet-tracking media analytics tool, kept track and says that some of the usual brands were lacking, while others made a big splash.

TweetReach wrote about its tracking of Super Bowl ads on its blog today:

We tracked Twitter mentions of the 30+ major Super Bowl advertisers, measuring tweet volume and overall impressions generated for these brands during the game. [...] We ranked the top-performing advertisers by overall tweet volume generated during the Super Bowl. Some of these brands ran one ad (Chrysler), while others ran multiple ads (Doritos).

It then lists the top 10 brands, with the caveat that "due to high tweet volumes about these ads during the Super Bowl, Twitter at times imposed some collection rate limits," noting that counts may actually account for just 70% to 90% of all possible tweets. "The numbers [below] can be interpreted directionally, just know that they are slightly lower than the true number of tweets for each brand." With that said, here are the top 10 brands, according to their presence on Twitter:

1. Doritos - 56,000+ tweets
2. Chrysler - 39,000+ tweets
3. Pepsi - 32,000+ tweets
4. (tie)Best Buy - 26,000+ tweets
   (tie). Volkswagen - 26,000+ tweets
5. Anheuser-Busch - 25,000+ tweets
6. Groupon - 22,000+ tweets
7. GoDaddy.com - 19,000+ tweets
8. Chevrolet - 18,000+ tweets
9. Audi - 14,000+ tweets

What's interesting about this list? Well, Groupon made it big, if you go by the mantra "any press is good press." It aired three commercials during the event yesterday, with at least one considered quite offensive, not only by ReadWriteWeb's Marshall Kirkpatrick, but many others on Twitter. Take a look at a word cloud created using Wordle that looks at tweets about Groupon during the Super Bowl.

Besides "Tibet", it looks like Groupon took a big hit on Twitter yesterday, with "bad", "offensive", "fail" and "kenneth" all standing out. "Kenneth" is a reference to the Kenneth Cole tweet from last week that tried to leverage the Twitter conversation on protests in Egypt. Many thought the tweet was in poor taste and the company soon apologized and removed the tweet.

Now, Groupon is getting a similar response to its Super Bowl ads, but it sure did get people talking about the company. GoDaddy followed closely behind Groupon with its yearly display of moderately offensive, misogynistic advertising. In terms of mentions on Twitter, the new Motorola Xoom tablet and the PlayStation phone didn't even breach the top 10. If the numbers are right, then it surely seems that Groupon and GoDaddy have found the way to get mentioned on Twitter.

What do you think - is it worth it? Is any press good press? It seems that at least two tech companies think the answer is a resounding yes, and if their Twitter mentions are any indication, then they are correct. But is the Groupon brand irreparably damaged in your mind or will this just be a blip on its path to global, coupon-clipping domination? After all, this, right here, is yet another mention of Groupon in the press.

When it comes to statistics, it seems that you can find anyone to back whatever opinion you might have. Just yesterday, Android was named the number one smartphone platform worldwide...when you look at shipments. Today, however, we've come across a stat that is equally good and bad for everyone involved, because everyone is the same.

According to Nielsen,  "the competition between smartphone operating systems is a heated one" with a three-way tie between Blackberry, Android and iOS.

"When it comes to the installed base, that is, U.S. mobile consumers who already own smartphones, it is a three-way tie between Blackberry RIM, the smartphone pioneer, Apple's IOS, which revolutionized the smartphone and popularized mobile apps, and Android OS, the operating system created by Google which has been taking the market by storm," writes the company on its blog. Take a look at the graph for the three mobile platforms:

Of course, what the company doesn't note is the obvious trajectories for these three companies. Blackberry is on a continual downslope, Android is on a upslope, while Apple has been hovering in a sine wave fashion around the 30% mark for the past two years.

As it notes, however, "Analyzing the preferences of those who purchased a smartphone in the past six months paints a different picture."

Here, the image almost looks identical, but with each platform continuing its curve. Android takes the lead among new smartphone owners with 43%, Apple hangs around with 26% and Blackberry rounds up the pack with 20%.

What do you think? Will the second image soon stand in place for the first when it comes to mobile OS adoption?

If you're looking for a new Internet Service Provider, why rely on anecdotal accounts from Yelp or Reddit? When it comes to how fast data moves from one point to another, there's perception, and then there's numbers...and Netflix has the numbers.

"We find ourselves in the unique position," wrote Ken Florance, director of content delivery at Netflix, "of having insight into the performance of hundreds of millions of long duration, high-definition video streams delivered over the Internet."

Netflix ranking of ISP speed isn't simply for short bursts of data transfer, it's for sustained transfer over time.  Florance explains that Netflix data actually smoothes out a number of issues in comparing ISP speeds:

As we use a number of CDNs, and our clients can adapt to changing network conditions by selecting the network path that's currently giving them the best throughput, Netflix streaming performance ends up being an interesting way to measure sustained throughput available from a given ISP over time, and therefore the quality of Netflix streaming that ISP is providing to our subscribers. Obviously, this can vary by network technology (e.g. DSL, Cable), region, etc., but it's a great high-level view of Netflix performance across a large number of individual streaming sessions.

Take a look at Netflix chart of the top 16 ISPs in the U.S.:

The company also offers a chart for Canada, where it began offering streaming-only service last year. Florance says the company will update the charts monthly.