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.

Commenting Is A Shouting Match

The tweaks, engineered to boost enagagement, should be a boon for Facebook's one billion plus users as well as the brands that try to reach them.

For brands in particular, Facebook comments are a total mess. Say you've got a few thousand followers. You post something that riles them up and you've got a deluge of comments rolling in. Suddenly it's a conversation, right? Not exactly. There may be 200 comments on your latest post, but each one is the equivalent of a someone walking up and stapling their thoughts onto a telephone pole.

Tenacious engagers might cruise back around or even wade into the comment pool and tag users by name to reply, but it's mostly just a tangle of people shouting over each other in chronological order. Popular comments might attract a lot of likes, but they don't move up or down the totem pole or get called out in any way. 

Likes Get A Bigger Role

As the screenshot shows, the new commenting system adds a one-layer-deep level of replies. Users can respond to a comment on the original post, but (thankfully) won't be able to reply to a reply. This basic improvement should help clear up the confusion about who is talking to whom in an ongoing Facebook comment thread. Better yet, comments that garner a bunch of likes will rise to the top, highlighting more interesting or on-point comments.

Of course, many sites already provide some kind of yea-or-nay feedback system that encourages quality content to rise to the top, user-generated or otherwise. Google introduced the +1 to its social search results. The painstakingly tuned commenting systems on sites like Gawker mercifully let readers downvote stupid comments into oblivion. Buzzfeed's social curation offers a veritable viral buffet, with buttons encouraging users to LOL or OMG (WTF).

Facebook's Like button has been many things to many users since the company first introduced it in 2009. Now, Likes look poised to evolve into a less dynamic version of Reddit's upvotes, the social ranking machine that makes the latter site go 'round - and keeps its users coming back for more. Facebook is no doubt hoping its new system will do the same.

One of the best reputation-measurement tools that I use is Topsy. Ever since Google failed to renew its deal with Twitter to include real-time tweets in its search results, I've looked for a way to track who's tweeting and sharing my stories. (Hey, I'm a journalist. I'm vain.)

Twitter reveals less information than I want, and Klout is obssessed with giving you a score, not detailed tracking of what's actually happening, so I kept looking. A while ago, I stumbled on Topsy.

If you produce content, and want to track who shares it, this tool is for you. Topsy gauges influence by measuring the support and attention an individual gets, according to Jamie de Guerre, Topsy's vice president of products. Topsy's algorithm tracks topics, sentiment, geo-locations and conversations throughout public social networks.

If your content is frequently retweeted and followed by other influential people, you gain influence, explained de Guerre. What might be a curiosity for the average person on Facebook is potentially significant data for businesses.

"Influence scores are then used to surface the most important results and to show customers the influencers for their brand or topic," said de Guerre.

The Anti-Klout

Unlike Klout, Topsy doesn't rely on a single "score" to define social media influence - a model that many observers view as finicky and less than scientific. Instead, it uses an internal ranking based on how and by whom your content is shared. That ranking determines whether or not you're designated as "influential."

Unlike Klout, which allows, and practically encourages users to game the system by offering them the ability to bestow +1s for what the site considers influential topics, Topsy doesn't let users explicitly vote on someone's influence. 

But perhaps Topsy's biggest selling point is what it doesn't do: the service doesn't reveal user scores. That simple, easy to read score - Klout's calling card and biggest selling point - is also its biggest weakness. Obsessing over that number can quicly become addictive - and separated from geniune social influence. 

Other social ranking sites - like Kred and PROskore - also use variations on that Klout model. Kred claims to focus on ranking influence based on "trust and generosity." The words sound rosy, but it's hard to tell how much to trust them.

PROskore, on the other hand, says it measure scores based on a person's "professional reputation." The site describes that as business relationships and even popularity. Yup. No matter what field you're in, you never left high school. Life is still a popularity contest.

Or several different popularity contests. WIth all these competing social media influence scores, it's impossible to know which one is the definitive value. That's why I stay away from these score-ranking sites and put my trust in Topsy.

Images courtesy of Shutterstock and steffanomaggi