Even as recently as this weekend Techcrunch reported that Pinterest has over 10.4 million registered users, 9 million monthly Facebook-connected users, and 2 million daily Facebook users. (It is important to keep in mind that some of these stats are still speculation or determined through number of Likes on Facebook so are not true active user stats, yet.)

Okay, so we know that Pinterest is popular. But the question is, just how groundbreaking will it be? Dean Browell, PhD and EVP at Feedback, tackles that question in the UK’s MyCustomer.com:

Brandweiner writes, “With Pinterest’s more personalised approach for brands – particularly retailers – and growing popularity, how does the network fare against Facebook and could we have finally found a social platform to knock it off its perch?

Dean Browell from Feedback doesn’t think so. “There’s no way Pinterest will kill Facebook – it just isn’t the same network so can’t replace it,” he concludes. “But it can influence it. I think Pinterest will become and stay popular, in the vein of Tumblr with the possibilities of Twitter.”

So there you have it. It doesn’t look like the interest with Pinterest is going to wane anytime soon. My interest, however, is now more focused on how its success is going to influence the leading social networks.

-Anna (@alucas9)

Active Tweeters
At the Web2.0 Summit Twitter CEO Dick Costolo shared statistics on active users. Twitter now has 100 million month active users, and of those 50% log in everyday. Twitter isn’t catching up to Facebook just yet. Facebook has more than 800 million active users, and of those 50% log in everyday.

iPhone 4$:
With a dual-core AA5 chip, new camera and optics, iCloud and Siri (Apple’s voice recognition app), the iPhone 4S is pretty impressive. Sales for the newest iPhone are pretty impressive as well. Let’s look back a bit: it took 74 days to sell the first million iPhone’s and it took three weeks to sell three million iPhone 4′s.

Drumroll, please.

It only took one weekend to sell 4 million iPhone 4S’, making a new iPhone sales record.

Now, for those of you who don’t have it yet, the question is “To upgrade or not to upgrade?”

Social & Mobile
Highlights from a recent ComScore Study:

Those using social networks from their mobile device grew 37% in the past year and more than half accessed social networks almost every day.

Facebook’s mobile audience is approaching 60 million users. In the past year, mobile posts grew by 50% on Facebook,  75% on Twitter and 69% on LinkedIn.

70% of mobile social networkers posted a status update from their phone and the majority of them read posts from brands from their device.

“Social Jobs”
Facebook and the Department of Labor are working together to connect job-seekers and employers through Facebook. Called Social Jobs,  “The partnership’s goal will be to facilitate employment for America’s jobless through the use of social networks.” Social Jobs aims to provide job postings and resources for job-seekers and recruiters. Like “Social Jobs Partnership” on Facebook to learn more: https://www.facebook.com/socialjobs. (With never-ending privacy issues, I wonder if people will be weary of “Social Jobs” as many don’t want potential employers seeing any part of their Facebook life.)

Are You LinkedIn with your Classmates?
While Facebook was adding features to help users find jobs, LinkedIn was busy adding a feature to help users expand their network. “LinkedIn Classmates” is a new feature that makes it easier to connect with alumni from your college/university. As LinkedIn described,  “In the years since college, your classmates have become experienced professionals, industry experts, potential clients and trusted colleagues – in short, people who can help you expand your horizons.” This new tool allows you to see where alumni work, what they do, and where they live. You can also see what you have in common now, making it easier to network and connect with them.

-Anna (@alucas9)

Facebook has unveiled – in an attempt to curb the growth and keep up with features of Twitter, Google+ and others like it – a feature called “Subscribe,” which will allow Facebook users to, well, subscribe to the news of others. You’ll be able to begin hand-picking the content you want to view on your wall, thus fine-tuning the Facebook experience to your liking instead of having to see the somewhat random mess of updates from an array of people.

Subscribe is completely optional; if you don’t use it, Facebook will continue to run as it always does.

But for those who choose to use Subscribe, the benefits could be many. Like Twitter, instead of “friending” a celebrity or someone you’re really not friends with but are otherwise interested in, Subscribing will let you simply follow their updates (provided the person allows subscribers) without getting all their personal details. Subscribe means that popular or up-and-coming performers, writers, singers or comedians will see their stars shine a bit brighter. Self-proclaimed social media gurus will begin to measure their self-worth on the number of Subscribers they have. And you may find yourself with people you truly don’t know who are interested in what you have to share.

Subscribing may be the answer to keeping people on Facebook while tightening the experience to meet the demands of what people are looking for in today’s social networks: greater control, a more personalized experience, and a reason to stay at Facebook instead of another service: the people.

Facebook, unlike the rash of other services available, already has the critical mass. Yet if you take the pulse of savvy web users and even everyday Facebook users, you’ll hear stories of Facebook fatigue, the desire for more control over content, the need for privacy, or simply that they’ve done everything they can do on the site and are moving on. And while it is still growing, that growth is perhaps slowing (even dropping by 6 million users in May, Inside Facebook reports). It’s no death knell, but it could be telling.

For these reasons, we’re seeing more niche, focused communities pop up on Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, Path and other platforms. They are more private, and the people on them more difficult to find.

This “privitization” of social networks is a trend we’ve been watching closely. And Facebook is about to board this train in a big way.

Not all of this is new, revolutionary or mind-blowing. But Facebook Subscribe is a bit of a mind-blower when you apply what this is and does to the masses of the social network, the paradigms in play in digital media, and the ever-increasing complexity of the modern identity.

Does it mean everyone will use and understand Subscribing right out of the gate? No, but its very existence is a product of some other trends and thoughts. For months (which is how we count technology time) people have been organizing their lives into separate places: Twitter for public thoughts, Tumblr as an extension of that community or to share personal interests with others, photo-sharing apps like Path or Instagram to share slice-of-life pictures and video.

Up until now, Facebook wasn’t really adequate in separating content as well as simple privacy. But with Subscribing, now even the non-savvy can start stratifying in new ways. People will share more, and less. Lives will take new shapes to certain people. And therefore, so will identities.

The layers of social soil just got more interesting for your garden.

There’s been quite a bit of chatter surrounding Twitter demographics and ethicity, however uncomfortable broaching the topic may be. One of the most interesting statistics to come out of it all are the levels of African American users on Twitter, because the figures are so disproportional to the overall U.S. representation.

A study done by Pew indicated that as of May 2011, 25 percent of African-Americans use Twitter as compared to 19 percent of Hispanics and only 9 percent of whites (note: these figures reflect the percentages of Americans as a whole who use Twitter, and not the actual makeup of the service, which is about half white and a quarter black).

A humorous but factual presentation by The Onion’s digital director, Baratunde Thurston – bluntly titled “How to be Black Online” – noted that while less than half of African-Americans have high-speed Internet at home, they dominate mobile broadband usage – nearly double that of their white counterparts. And the ease of Twitter (140 characters or less to update) and access to other people within the service makes it popular for use on mobile devices.

And lastly, a study suggested that Twitter adoption among African-Americans was based on the finding that they are more likely to have a greater interest than other ethnic groups in celebrity and gossip news. And thanks to the fall of MySpace, Twitter has become the online outlet of choice for celebrity drama. Plus, you can shout at them.

In my opinion, it’s the age of user as opposed to race that might be most indicative of how people are using Twitter.

The younger generations (teens and young twentysomethings) of Caucasians, African-Americans, Latinos, and others generally use Twitter as a public instant messenger. It’s more conversational than Facebook, and they can not only message their friends, but also tweet celebrities and read their tweets in real-time. Like Myspace, users can also personalize their pages with colors, designs, and different backgrounds.

Thurston also makes mention of the Twitter trending topics that dominate many evening chats (such as, #thingshoodratslove, #ghettohurricanenames, or #waystogetoffthephone) in the U.S., referring to them as, “blacktags.” It’s even a subject that has entered the halls of academia. From Slate:

Brendan Meeder thinks he’s got a good hypothesis about what’s going on. Meeder, a Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon University, has downloaded the tweets of more than 100 million users. (Twitter gave him special permission to do so for research purposes.) He’s been probing this collection to see how Twitter users interact with one another; he’s particularly interested in how trends begin and spread through a social network.

While analyzing his database a few months ago, Meeder noticed something strange—he found a cluster of hundreds of users whose profiles were connected to one another. When he looked up the users, he noticed that a lot of them were black. It’s in exactly these kinds of tight-knit groups that Twitter memes flourish, Meeder says.

“It’s my impression that these hashtags start in dense communities—people who are highly connected to each other,” Meeder says. “If you have 50 of these people talking about it, think about the number of outsiders who follow at least one of those 50—it’s pretty high at that point. So you can actually get a pretty big network effect by having high density.”

These kinds of bonds are obviously not unique to social media – rather, these are cultural distinctions we are merely seeing reflected inside. The nation’s African American community is finding its voice and community on the web, and that platform of choice is increasingly looking like Twitter.

In coming months, we’ll explore ethnicity, age and other personal traits and how different cultures interact online.

-Brittany (@britgary)

Photo credit:

It’s refreshing, then, that one of the latest trends we’re monitoring is that of the closed, private network.

Path, an app for the iPhone (and likely other devices to come), is more of an anti-social network

There’s an interesting thing happening that flows against the constant onslaught of “everything, everywhere,” where content explodes into the public cloud for us all to sift through. We’ve seen it in our own research at Feedback, where industry sub-groups lock doors behind them in private message boards and tiny social caves.

But we’ve also seen more and more built into web apps. One of the most obvious examples in my own life is Path.

Path was first just something we were checking out for Feedback, as we test and jostle and over-use all sorts of new apps on a regular basis. But Path has taken off in an interesting way. The concept is simple: a photo and video-sharing app that doesn’t aim to broadcast your media to the world, but instead focuses on a hand-picked group – an inner-circle of your friends, up to 50 people, that you’d like to share these “Moments” with. Path also carries some neat tricks such as different lenses, location and time-aware plotting. More recently, the “Stacks” feature organizes all of the photos by how you’ve tagged them with People, Places and Things.

I’ve observed two interesting phenomenon in Path: A voice for the introverted, and a personal fanclub.

First I noticed that some of the same people that would never (or rarely) share their every moment on Facebook were more comfortable on Path. Even more telling, they would use Path when they weren’t at home, where they might not signal on other social channels that they weren’t at home. They could do so on Path, because they were only telling the few people that knew they were gone anyway. I found it interesting that these same people never used the full 50 person limit. In fact my own Path barely uses 20 regulars – and I’m fine with that. I found myself revealing more intimate moments on Path. Things I wouldn’t be judged on or things I didn’t have to be concerned with the reaction of the outside world or that errant friend. On Path people would just as soon capture a quiet, fantastic moment of clarity as they would an artistic photo of two dozen Jell-o shots.

Which brings me to the second thing I saw happening: being allowed to see someone’s Path was like being in their fanclub. It is a privileged spot that gives the small audience a behind-the-scenes look at someone’s life. While you might see them remark on Twitter with a general “today was a big day,” on Path you’d get the shot of them getting ready for a job interview. While on Facebook I might post the friend-friendly shot of my daughter Addy on the beach, on Path I would post the less-cheesy but more interesting shot of her spending quality time with her grandfather.

It’s awesome to see my friends take the same – uh, path – in providing a look into the second layer of their life. Path goes beyond the more polished sheen of a person’s social life that is under more scrutiny by a large number of friends, followers and in some cases complete strangers.

Recent articles and conversations I’ve had with analysts muse that the reason many people hadn’t heard about Path was that those who use it don’t make it very public (and for a reason: if I let you know I’m on Path but I don’t want to share with you, that’s a deliberate snub). While it seemed like more of a PR dodge of the popularity question, I actually believe them. There was even a twinge of, “Should I?” before I wrote this blog post because to be frank, I’m not going to let most of the people who read this be in on my Path.

I’d love to see Path succeed and I think it has a long life ahead of it with added features and more depth. That said, if it ends up going away I won’t be shocked, as I fully expect someone to buy it up and mishandle it. That’s the startup way. Sometimes Path gets pitted against other photo-sharing apps like Instagram (a coworker and I frequently have staring contests about that matchup) but it’s really not trying to compete; sure it shares some image-alteration features, but Path’s aim is about handing you ways to create an exclusivity in your social life via the channel — not the placement of your media into a fatter pipe for filtering by others. Path filters at the front, from the perspective of the poster.

But the concept behind Path – the private social network – is certainly not going away. We see it living out on Facebook in private groups and the stricter use of Friends Lists, for example. The inclination to share is being encouraged from all corners, but the “with whom” will become a more important question.

-Dean (@dbrowell)

Happy #EarthDay!

Many online users are taking to Twitter and Facebook to show their support for Earth Day. You can join in the conversation on Twitter by using the hashtag #EarthDay or keep updated on Facebook by liking The Earth Day Network.

Some Earth Day deals to be aware of:

• Starbucks: Bring a reusable mug to Starbucks for free java or tea
• The Disney Store: Bring in 5 disposable plastic bags for them to recycle and receive a free reusable shopping bag.
• Lowe’s: They will be giving away 1 million trees on April 23rd.
• National Park Service: For Earth Day, The National Park service has made all National parks free from April 16-24^th.

Noisy Tweeter Feature

Twitter is testing a new feature to deal with noisy Twitter users. The feature appears to hide tweets if a user posts several times in a row. As the following image shows, the users most recent tweet will still be displayed and will be followed by a collapsed bar that you can expand if you want to see the other tweets. Learn more at TNW.

Photo from The Next Web

I “Like” Birthdays

Happy Birthday to the Facebook “Like Button.” The like button debuted only one year ago at the f8 conference and has since become one of Facebook’s most popular features.

InsideFacebook highlighted some of the stats behind the button:

• 10,000 websites integrate with Facebook each day
• More than 2.5 million websites have integrated with Facebook (including over 80 of comScore’s U.S. Top 100 websites and over half of comScore’s Global Top 100 websites)
• Over half of the 25 fastest growing Comscore U.S. retail sites use Facebook
• Media sites that adopt the Like button average a greater than 300% increase in referral traffic from Facebook

High-tech Dining

Check out the article E la Carte: Table-Top Computers Bring Restaurants To The Future (With Bonus Trivia!) by TechCrunch. It highlights a new high-tech way to dine. E la Cart, a computer based restaurant system, debuted this week. At the lucky 20 restaurants using these systems, diners are given a portable tablet-like device complete with the restaurant menu, games, and more. Diners order by selecting what they want on the device and their requests are sent right to the kitchen. And when they’re all finished, diners can even even pay with E la Cart. It is certainly an interesting concept to keep an eye on.

Can Not Cloud Compute

On Wednesday, Amazon experienced major connectivity and latency issues with their cloud computing system, which eventually led to a temporary system collapse. As CNN reports,

“The trouble was apparently due to excessive re-mirroring of its Elastic Block Storage (EBS) volumes — this essentially created countless new backups of the EBS volumes that took up Amazon’s storage capacity and triggered a cascading effect that caused downtime on hundreds (or more likely thousands) of websites for almost 24 hours.”

Foursquare, Quora, Hootsuite, and Reddit were among those affected. As FathomDB founder Justin Santa Barbara pointed out, “Cloud computing is still in its infancy, and today’s events make it clear that we still have a lot of work to do.”

-Anna (@alucas9)

Who Won The #SXSW Battle?

SimplyMeasured took a look at #sxsw hashtag chatter on Twitter during the interactive portion of the conference to determine which products garnered the most buzz. The winners were GroupMe for messaging service, Foursquare for check-in service, and iPhone for mobile platform. View the following charts to see the breakdown of contenders.

Twitter By the Numbers:

This week, Twitter turns five. On March 21, 2006 @jack (Jack Dorsey) sent the first tweet. Five years later, around a billion tweets are sent within a week. Wow.

Here are some of the attention-grabbing stats listed on Twitter’s blog:

• 3 years, 2 months and 1 day. The time it took from the first Tweet to the billionth Tweet.
• 1 week. The time it now takes for users to send a billion Tweets.
• 50 million. The average number of Tweets people sent per day, one year ago.
• 140 million. The average number of Tweets people sent per day, in the last month

• 572,000. Number of new accounts created on March 12, 2011.
• 460,000. Average number of new accounts per day over the last month.
• 182%. Increase in number of mobile users over the past year.

March Madness:

The madness has begun! NCAA Basketball fans, if you want to keep up with the scores or check your bracket(s) on the go, there are several apps you can use. Apps include ESPN Bracket Bound 2011 (for those in ESPN tournament), NCAA March Madness on Demand (Watch games live), and NCAA Fan Zone – March Madness (Scores) – and they’re all free.

Who’s going to take the win? According to a study completed by Zeda interactive, internet fans top picks include Syracuse, Duke, Kansas, and Wisconsin. So far, these teams have had the highest positive online buzz rankings.

Facebook Deal Subscriptions:

This week, Facebook is urging users to subscribe to their Deal service. With Groupon and LivingSocial, users learn about deals from daily emails and sharing among friends. Facebook appears to be trying to achieve this same stickiness, and is urging users to subscribe to Facebook Deals and invite their friends to subscribe as well.  Those who subscribe will soon receive news feed updates about local deals.

Free Reading:

I read an interesting article today titled “The Google Loophole Has Become The Facebook/Twitter Loophole.” It discusses how paid online news websites, such The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times (which just announced a digital subscription), actually have loopholes where people can read for free. The main point of the article is that this loophole is shifting from search to social. For example, The Wall Street Journal allows free access if you type the article name into Google. The New York Times mentioned yesterday that they will be offering a new type of “loophole” for Facebook and Twitter users. All readers who come to the NYT through Facebook or Twitter will be able to read for free.

Facebook Streaming Movies:

Warner Bros. is testing out streaming movies on Facebook with “The Dark Knight”. The movie rental costs users $3.00 (Facebook will receive 30% of revenues) and can be watched for 48 hours after purchase.  If the test goes well, we are likely to see more video streaming options on Facebook.

Foursquare v3.0:

Foursquare’s latest app version, v3.0, has some innovative new features. They have done away with the “tips” tab and replaced it with an “explore” tab. The explore tab will look at your information (where you’ve checked in, who you’re connected with, your favorite places to check in) and what you’re looking for (nightlife, sushi, etc.) to show you what Foursquare thinks you’ll like nearby. You will also be able to see how many of your friends have been to a recommended place, and what reviews have been posted about it.

The iPad 2 Available Today:

The iPad 2 has arrived. You can order it online now, and purchase it in store starting at 5pm local time. They will be sold at the Apple Store, AT&T, Best Buy, Target, Verizon Wireless, Walmart and select Apple Authorized Resellers. Starting early today, people were lined up at Apple Stores all over the country in hopes of being some of the first to get the latest tech gadget.

Image from CultofMac.com

SXSW Interactive:

South by SouthWest’s interactive portion was kicked off today in Austin, Texas. Five days of networking events, presentations, announcements and exhibits, all centered around emerging technology. For those of us who can’t be there, we can follow along with the hashtag #SXSW or visit our favorite social media news websites (such as http://techcrunch.com/sxsw/) for updates.

Japan & Social Media:

When a tsunami and an 8.8 magnitude earthquake tragically hit Japan this morning, many took to social media. Some families relied on social media to get in touch with their loved ones, and Google even launched a Japan earthquake person finder to help victims and families locate each other.

There has been an overwhelming amount of support spread though social media channels:

-Anna (@alucas9)

Apple announced the iPad 2 this week. The iPad 2 is 33% thinner, has duel webcams, and new color options. The prices will range from $499 (for 16GB WiFi-only models) to $829 (for the works) and will be available on March 11, 2011. Watch the following video to see more about the new iPad:

(For those who are TeamCoCo, watch a spoof on the commercial here.)

@CharlieSheen:

You’ve probably been following the tirades of Charlie Sheen… actually I know some of you are (on twitter, at least). Charlie Sheen joined Twitter (@charliesheen) this week, and gained a million followers in a little over 24 hours, breaking a Guinness World record.

Side note: Three Feedbacker’s made it into the list of Charlie Sheen’s top 10 followers. #Winning

Libya’s Internet Down

The government has shut down the internet for most of Libya, including the capital city of Tripoli. The Wall Street Journal reported, “U.S. firms that monitor global Internet networks reported that Web traffic in and out of Libya was disconnected abruptly Thursday afternoon local time and continued to be unavailable late Friday.” This is all too familiar to what we saw a few weeks ago in Egypt. Learn more here.

Behind the Scenes with Old Spice

Old Spice brought you the man that smells like a man, man, and now they’re bring you behind the scenes of their latest commercial shoot. Take a look at the following video, which shows the creative process behind the latest Old Spice commercial:

Healthcare Pick: Emerging Media Whitepaper

Those who are members of SHSMD, take a look at the official Emerging Media Handbook/Whitepaper from SHSMD – Society for Healthcare Strategy and Market Development where Feedback’s Dean Browell wrote the introduction as the Chair of the Emerging Media Task Force.

-Anna (@alucas9)

The sense of immediacy and accessibility created by social media enables these types of rallies and events to take place at a larger and more frequent scale. What once would have taken days and intricate levels of planning are now easy and can reach a wider audience in a shorter span of time.

Consider the story of UK Uncut, a group that is currently organizing protests throughout the United Kingdom. Their following will have jumped by 400 people in the amount of time it’ll take me to finish writing this article.

UK Uncut is a political action group against budget cuts that allow wealthy individuals and corporations skip out on their taxes. Now, I won’t get into the politics of it all, but this “citizen army” has taken to the digital battlefield with zeal, using Twitter and the hashtag #ukuncuts to organize flash mobs that have caused major UK chain stores like Vodafone, a telecommunications company that owns 45 percent of Verizon Wireless, to shut up shop for a day after protestors claimed the group skipped out on paying taxes. The campaign caught like wildfire and the Twitter account now boasts 10,000+ followers. Their website lists the organizations targets and protest schedule, and it’s a pretty impressive list.

And UK Uncut isn’t the first to do this kind of political activism. Far from it. One of the first flash mobs for political purposes was orchestrated before the term social media had taken root, in 2003, by Doonesbury cartoonist Gary Trudeau. More than 100 people showed up under the Space Needle in Seattle, linked arms, jumped up and down, and chanted “The doctor is in” to support presidential candidate Howard Dean. The flash mob didn’t even last a minute before dispersing.

Protesters in Belarus organize through social media and eat ice cream.

A more compelling example is the ice cream flash mob that happened in Belarus in 2006. LiveJournal was used to gather protestors at Oktyabrskaya Square to eat ice cream in protest of one of the most repressive government in Europe. Police were waiting for the protestors and arrested some of the ice cream eaters. The kids got their point across: “What type of government would arrest people for eating ice cream in the street?”

It was a small act that had a big message.

This ability to congregate on a massive scale quickly is forcing the political sphere to alter the way it interprets and reacts to constituents. We no longer live in a world where people learn news the next day – it is right here and now that chants for action take place. The question is: Will politicians heed the call?

-Brittney (@bntrim)