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Filed under: Social Software, Analysis, web 2.0

Facebook-FriendFeed marriage guarantees future of social media d**ch*bags

What do you get when you take a gaggle of enthusiastic, early-adopting online marketers and introduce them to one of the world's largest directories of job-seeking college students? We're about to find out, now that Facebook is acquiring FriendFeed. The move should mean improved versions of the real-time status and conversation features that Facebook was already moving toward, but that's not all Facebook bought. It's also getting most of FriendFeed's users.

It's not as if social media, um, d-bags, didn't know Facebook existed. Au contraire, they've been all over it for at least a year, begging people to become fans of their clients. College students, however, are about to find out that social media jobs exist, and are one of the best rackets going. Wait, you mean I can bother people online, using networks I was already signed up to anyway, and get paid for it? When do I start?

Social media isn't going away any time soon, and it has a lot of upside, but it also has a lot of our attention. It's one of the few places marketers can still get eyeballs, and members of the first generation that really grew up with it are about to enter the workforce and start selling things to one another. Maybe it was inevitable -- and maybe it will burn out after a while, to make room for new models based on new technology -- but I'm willing to bet we'll look back and point to the time FriendFeed met Facebook as the moment it really started to accelerate.

Filed under: Business, Internet, Social Software, Analysis, web 2.0, Web

Twitter statistics that make you go "hmmmm"

Twitter statisticsSomething feels a little wrong about having to rely on a company that defines itself as a social media analyst to discover fully 15% of the Twitter users that follow more than 2,000 accounts on the social network identify themselves as "social media marketers." that of the people who identify themselves as marketers, 15% follow more than 2,000 people compared to 0.3% of total Twitter users following more than 2,000 people. Yet this is one in a set of ten interesting statistics to come out of a report by social media analysis company Sysomos on Twitter usage.

A summary of the 10 most interesting points from Sysomos' report was done by the Rohit Bhargava, and includes info-nuggets like the fact that over half of all Twitter accounts are inactive (have not posted an update in over a week), and that the top 5% of accounts by volume of updates are responsible for 75% of the updates published on the site. Unfortunately, some of the statistics given are tenuous at best. For example, the report contains a claim that 65% of Twitter users are under the age of 25, but as Bhargava points out, less than 1% of Twitter users actually disclose their age.

Putting together meaningful statistics on Twitter is an admirable, but near impossible task. There are simply too many variables, and not enough data to go on; Twitter's minimalist approach doesn't give analysts much to go on. Further, as David Pogue recently pointed out, users can easily change their usernames, significantly muddying the water.

So, what do you think - can we trust the numbers that are put out by social media analysis companies? Is this information useful, or is it akin to reading tea leaves?

Featured Time Waster

The World's Hardest Game 2.0 - Time Waster

So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do. Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game. The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...

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