These are my links for January 14th:

• “I’m With COCO” Spreads Like Wildfire On Facebook –
• Twitter Grows Internationally, But Very Few Use Location [STATS] –
• “Pants On The Ground” Becomes A Viral Sensation On Facebook –
• TwitPic Worth More Than $10 Million? –
• Twitter for Teams: Teambox Launches Web-Based Collaboration Tool –

These are my links for January 12th through January 13th:

• Internet Recovery? Zillow to IPO in 2011 –
• Thousands of Archived Tweets Mysteriously Disappear –
• Where the Heck Did Retweet.com Go? –
• Red Cross Raises $800,000+ for Haiti Through Text Message Campaign –
• Social Media Today | The top ten Twitter statistics and analytics tools –
• Social Media Today | Social Media RFP: Ask the Right Questions, Find the Right Partner –

These are my links for December 30th through December 31st:

• Digg Takes a Dip In Traffic, Half The Size Of Twitter – But its latest growth spurt stopped in September, 2009 when it peaked at 32 million unique visitors worldwide, according to comScore. In November, its worldwide visitors were down 15 percent to 27 million, which is about half the number of people who visit Twitter.com. Digg was passed by Twitter back in March (see chart below).
• In 2009, Social Media Overtook Web 2.0 [GRAPHS] – While its definition is not yet etched in stone, most believe it describes a new type of media and communication that creates a world conversation and dialogue. Instead of being fed news (a one-to-many dissemination approach), everyone is welcomed to be a content creator and to generate a debate around that content. While its focus is the web, it goes beyond it as well.
• Digg to aggregate what’s trending on Twitter and Facebook – Holy Kaw! – Looks like Kevin Rose may have found a way to steer the Digg ship back on course with a site overhaul that rumors say will include an aggregation of what’s hot on Twitter and Facebook.
• FCC Chairman’s Facebook Account Compromised – The New York Times’ Bits blog is reporting that FCC head honcho Julius Genachowsi — the man in the middle of the net neutrality initiatives and the Google-Apple disputes — has fallen victim to the fraudulent activity of scammers on Facebook.
• Facebook: 5 Predictions for 2010 – Facebook has been around for more than five years, but it hit critical mass and exploded in 2009. As the new decade begins, the fallout is blowing over the entire web. Facebook Connect is everywhere, in case you hadn’t heard. We’re talking 60 million users on 80,000 web sites
• Facebook App’s Password Data Breach Turns into Lawsuit – Facebook and MySpace app maker and advertising network RockYou isn’t having a great December. Earlier this month, 32 million passwords were compromised by a hacker going by the alias of “igigi.” That’s more than half of RockYou’s monthly active users.
• The Androidification of Everything – GigaOM – A few days ago, Antonio Rodriguez, a Boston-based entrepreneur and founder of Tabblo, emailed to let me know that he was leaving Hewlett-Packard to go do something new. Rodriguez sold Tabblo to HP in 2007 and had been working on some cool stuff at HP, but now he’s decided that it’s time for him to head back to the startup ecosystem. We met when he was trying to get traction for Tabblo, but we have stayed in touch since, musing over the future of devices and user experiences. (Antonio chronicles many of his thoughts over on his blog.)

These are my links for December 23rd:

• Twittered Toddler Death Immediately Converted into Flame War – twitter – Gawker – Shellie Ross lost her two-year-old child when he drowned in the family swimming pool. She tweeted about the incident, hoping for emotional support. How do you think that went?
• How a Fake Twitter Death Report Tragically Came True – Chris Henry – Gawker – On December 16th, someone impersonating a newspaper writer falsely reported the death of football player Chris Henry. Henry died about 12 hours later, according to news reports, finally making one of Twitter’s many fake stories come true.
• Play And Share Your Music Collection In The Cloud With tunesBag – Vienna, Austria-based tunesBag is opening up the public beta version of its social music service today, after allowing access by invitation only for the past year or so
• Qik Live Recording Finally Makes It To The iPhone (Legally) – The live video streaming application Qik has just been approved in the App Store and should be available shortly, we’ve learned. The company submitted the app a couple weeks ago following the approval of Ustream’s live streaming application, and as expected, Apple also had no problem with it now. This marks a change from Apple, which previously was blocking all apps that did live video (recording) streaming
• More People Around The World Get Their News Online From Google News Than CNN – Well, Rupert Murdoch is going to love this. More people around the world get their news online from Google News than from CNN or the news properties of the New York Times. In November, 2009, according to comScore, Google News attracted 100 million unique visitors worldwide, making it a larger news site than CNN (66 million) or the combined properties of the New York Times (92 million). But do you know who is even larger? Yahoo News, with 138 million unique visitors worldwide. Funny how you never hear Murdoch complaining about Yahoo News.
• Making Facebook Pay – Facebook – Gawker – Facebook doubtlessly hoped forcing open user profiles would help the social network compete more profitably with open systems like Twitter. But there could well be a multi-million-dollar price to pay for the aggressive change, particularly if Facebook broke the law.
• How Google CEO’s ‘Ex’ Girlfriend Keeps Tabs on Him – marcy simon – Gawker – Eric Schmidt’s rekindled relationship with sometime girlfriend Marcy Simon may be heading into another season: After a summer of hanging out and an autumn jet ride, they’ve been spotted again this winter. And Simon’s keeping a close eye on Schmidt.
• Google Attempting to Swallow Trashy-Tasting Yelp – yelp – Gawker – Google is more likely than not to buy Yelp, say news reports. Which raises one glaringly obvious question: Will Google exacerbate or correct the local review site’s worst tendencies, which have brought extortion allegations, porny bacchanals and physical violence?
• Did Yelp’s Star Banker George Boutros Just Screw Up The Google Deal? – yelp – Gawker – There’s some amusing finger-pointing going on in the aftermath of the Google-Yelp affair (which, like any affair, may just be in remission).
• Criminal Escapes Prison, Taunts Police Via Facebook – Craig Lynch – Gizmodo – Say hello to Craig Lynch. He’ll give you the finger. The police has been hunting him since he escaped from prison last September, and now he’s using Facebook to taunt them. He seems like a very charming man:
• OneRiot Launches New Real-Time Ads to Monetize Trending Topics – OneRiot, one of the leading real-time search engines, just announced the launch of a new advertising product for real-time apps. RiotWise Trending Ads will give OneRiot’s partners a feed of ads related to currently trending topics on the Web. These ads can, for example, be integrated in a user’s stream of updates in Twitter apps or displayed as regular mobile ad units. Digsby, for example, plans to place these ads directly in its users’ streams, but because the units are delivered as a feed through OneRiot’s API, developers are free to use them in whatever way they see fit.
• 2010 Predictions – ReadWriteWeb Staff’s predictions for 2010
• Experts Predict 2010 the Year for Social Media ROI – ReadWriteStart -
• Yahoo! Will Kill MyBlogLog Next Month – 5 years to the month after it was founded, cross-blog social networking widget MyBlogLog will be closed down by Yahoo! in January, we’re hearing from sources close to the project. MyBlogLog is a service that shows blog writers and readers the faces and profile information of other MyBlogLog users that visit their sites.

This is the Link Report for September 20th through September 22nd:

Please feel free to post your thoughts in the comment section below

To see all of our links please visit our Delicious page at Delicious.com/goldsteinmedia

• Google Chrome Injects Itself Into Internet Explorer With Chrome Frame – Google just announced the launch of Chrome Frame, a new open-source project that will allow Chrome's rendering engine to run within Microsoft's Internet Explorer 6,7, and 8. This plugin, which is available now, will give developers the option to ask users if they would prefer to switch to the Chrome rendering and JavaScript engine. Users simply continue to use Internet Explorer and the switch will be completely seamless, with no noticeable changes to the user interface.
• Mobile SEO Best Practices | mobiThinking – Our basic mobile SEO advice is to assume nothing, go right back to basics and think through the following principles:
• Mobile Search 101, Part 2 – Search Engine Watch (SEW) – One of the challenges for developing and marketing on mobile devices is dealing with different browsers and how they render the Web. This has always been an issue for developers. Another challenge is the different screen sizes, orientations, and rendering speeds.
• Mobile Search 101, Part 1 – Search Engine Watch (SEW) – According to a recent Gartner report, mobile advertising is poised to grow 74 percent this year to $913.5 million. It's then predicted to accelerate in 2011 and then reach $13 billion in 2013. The increased consumer use of smartphones is said to be the contributing factor for the explosion.
• SEOmoz | How to Export Google Analytics Data to Excel via the API – From @wilreynolds. A way to export Google Analytics data to Excel through the API
• Tweet Scenes Launches Yet Another Twitter Background Creator – Companies and brands always want to have their Twitter profiles and background images fit their profile. Tweet Scenes is hoping to make the process of creating backgrounds for Twitter users much easier. You upload your logo, photos, text and links, and give some basic background information on your company and what you’re looking for. You then pay a flat fee ($129) up front, and get your design done in three business days.
• Our Microblogging Lives: Work, Home, Lunch, Sleep? – According to a study conducted by the researchers from Helsinki Institute for Information Technology, Google (Google) and Elisa the top 5 most frequent microblogging posts are “working,” “home,” “work,” “lunch,” and “sleeping.”
• 7 Ways to Boost Your SEO Career Profile | Search Engine Journal – In the current economic climate where the job market has become more and more competitive, sometimes sticking out from the crowd can be as easy as boosting your SEO resume by doing the things that you love.
• TinyChat – Disposable Chatrooms for the Twitter Generation – Even though we live in an age of instant Qik streams, video chats on Skype, and micro-blogging on Twitter, sometimes all you need is a simple chatroom for real-time text chats. TinyChat solves this problem by creating simple, disposable chatrooms. Tinychats works exactly as advertised. It's a disposable, no-frills chatroom, with a deliberately limited feature set. There are no accounts to sign up for and whenever you open up a new room, TinyChat will simply create a new URL for you.
• Greetings! – A quick primer on how to handle business events correctly

This is the Link Report for September 11th through September 13th:

Please feel free to post your thoughts in the comment section below

To see all of our links please visit our Delicious page at Delicious.com/goldsteinmedia

• What’s Yahoo’s “Plan B” For Search? – If the DOJ won't let the Microsoft/Yahoo Deal go through, what's next for the #2 search engine?
• Joe Wilson’s Payments Provider Reports DDoS Attack – The Austin-based online payments startup Piryx reports that it was targeted in a DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack yesterday due to its hosting of a fundraising campaign for Joe Wilson – the politican who made headlines this week after shouting “You Lie!” during Obama’s health care reform speech.
• What information is "personally identifiable"? | Electronic Frontier Foundation – You'd be surprised how information thought to be obscure really isn't.
• Facebook Lite Threatens Facebook’s Brand Advertising Businesss – Facebook Lite seems to be missing the mark. A very interesting piece on how this could hurt brands.
• Why Social RSS Could Be Huge – Phil Baumann talks about how using RSS socially could really bring about great results
• Forget Gen Y: Gen X is Making Real Change – ReadWriteEnterprise – Sometimes even the best researchers forget that the answer you get depends entirely on who you ask. A new Forrester survey of 2,000 information workers has revealed that despite the hype, it's not Gen Y that's getting business to adopt collaborative technology. Gen X, those who are 30-43, are the ones leading the charge for social computing.
• SEMPO Says Time To Get Serious About Mobile Search – SEMPO yesterday released a “POV” white paper that seeks to orient search marketers to the growing mobile market, mobile SEO and mobile paid search in particular. It cites the dramatic growth of mobile web usage and anticipated future growth in arguing that search marketers now need to take mobile seriously. Developed by SEMPO’s Emerging Technologies Committee, the report asks (and seeks to answer) several key questions
• The most popular digital goods are virtual money, weapons and gifts | VentureBeat – People are paying real money for digital goods in all sorts of online applications ranging from Facebook apps to massively multiplayer online games. The No. 1 thing they buy is virtual money. Other top items include virtual weapons and gifts for social networking friends, according to a survey released today.
• No, the Cloud is Not Killing Open Source – Andrea DiMaio from the Gartner Blog Network asks an interesting question in a post titled "Is Cloud Computing Killing Open Source in Government?," and InfoWorld weighs in on the issue as well. One might as well not limit the question to government usage. Is cloud computing killing open source in general? DiMaio notes that government officials in London and Washington D.C. are finding that primary drivers for open source adoption–including cost savings and vendor independence–are going away, while free, cloud applications proliferate and grab headlines.
• Uh-Oh! DOJ Expands Review of Microsoft-Yahoo Search Deal – Google may already have a monopoly on search, but that doesn’t mean the proposed search deal between Microsoft and Yahoo will be automatically greenlighted by federal officials. The Justice Department has expanded its review of the partnership agreed to by the search laggards, Bloomberg is reporting. The DOJ is going to challenge the argument that you need to be bigger in order to compete. I couldn’t agree more. My view is that you need to be smarter and faster. Of course as both Microsoft and Yahoo’s history in search proves, they’ve been neither.

This is the Daily Link Report for August 28th

Please feel free to post your thoughts in the comment section below

To see all of our links please visit our Delicious page at Delicious.com/goldsteinmedia

• SEOmoz | Early Detection: How Social Media May Save The World – Social Media can be used to help in disasters and quick reaction and help spread the news.
• Facebook to Introduce Charity Gifts – Last week, we reported that Facebook was opening up its virtual gift shop to third-party developers and also introducing physical gifts, for example, being able to send someone a dozen roses using Facebook credits.
• Do You Know Who’s on Twitter? – eMarketer – More than one-half of all Twitter users (53%) are women, and the majority are young. Among users who disclose their age, 66% are under 25, and another 15% are ages 25 to 29.
• Ted Kennedy’s family set up Twitter account to spread funeral news – Telegraph – Ted Kennedy's family have set up an account on Twitter to keep the public informed about plans for his funeral.
• Google Now Identifying Businesses in Street View | WebProNews – Google has now made it easier to view businesses in Street View on Google Maps. When a user conducts a local search, the bubble that pops up on business results will show a Street View link.

This is the Daily Link Report for August 18th

Please feel free to post your thoughts in the comment section below

To see all of our links please visit our Delicious page at Delicious.com/goldsteinmedia

• SEOmoz | Perfecting Keyword Targeting & On-Page Optimization – How Do I Build the Perfectly Optimized Page? Rand over at SEOMoz tell you how.
• What Women Want from Social Sites – eMarketer – Unsurprisingly, Facebook was the most popular social network among these users, with 83% belonging to the site. Nearly three-quarters (73%) were members of LinkedIn and 55% were on Twitter, while just 41% belonged to MySpace. Almost one-half of respondents (48%) reported belonging to four or more social networks—the most common response.

  Professional networking and staying up-to-date with friends were the most compelling reasons to visit social networks, according to the respondents. Substantial majorities also considered researching products and services (79%) and finding deals and discounts (64%) important.

• How to Target Users within Social Networks – Use search to find the right people to go after on Social Media
• Google News Now Recrawling & Reindexing Stories For Updates – A Google News Help thread has confirmed reports from Google's Inbal that Google News now reindexes and crawls news sources for the latest version if those updates are posted within a "short period of time." So if you make a mistake in your publication, you now have a short window of opportunity to update the article, in order to make sure Google News updates your mistake in their index.
• Facebook Sued for Privacy Breach – US News Briefs | Newser – A group of Facebook users has sued the social networking company for violating consumer privacy laws by harvesting personal information for commercial purposes and failing to compensate clients, reports CNET.
• Solid-state drives get faster, bigger, (relatively) cheaper | Computing | Chron.com – Houston Chronicle – Solid state… no moving parts and getting bigger both in size and in popularity
• 10 valuable Twitter utilities for business users | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com – One of the biggest reasons for Twitter’s growth and success is that the Twitter team allowed the service to be morphed and re-shaped by the user-base from the very beginning. We saw it happen in the way that the Twitter community instituted replies, retweets, and #hashtags.
• Twitter vs. Facebook: Who Will Win in Real-time Search? – For the last year, Twitter has had no major rival in real-time search. But last week, that all changed when Facebook launched its real-time search engine. Not only can it search status updates, but it also tracks photos, notes, videos, and more. Can Facebook, with its larger userbase and recent talent acquisition, make Twitter Search irrelevant? Or does Twitter’s open platform and first-mover advantage give it the edge?
• HOW TO: See Twitter Like Someone Else – Ever wanted to see Twitter the way someone else does, with all the Tweets from the people they follow? Now you can.
• New Privacy Lawsuit Throws The Kitchen Sink At Facebook – So what are the Plantiffs accusing Facebook of? The suit alleges that that Facebook is at its core a “data mining company.. [that] seeks to open and/or disseminate private information to third parties for commercial purposes and economic benefit” and that “Facebook has created a business model and apparatus designed to harvest as much personal and private information as possible in easiest, quickest, and most innocuous-looking manner possible.” Cue the ominous music. It gets better.

• FriendFeed Co-Founder: Facebook Acquisition Talks Began in 2007 – The details!
• SEOmoz | 4 Essential SEO Infographics – Rand Fishkin at SEOMoz.org published a great post with Info Graphics that relate to SEO
• 2009 Facebook and Twitter Growth by Age Group | Ignite Social Media – The following chart by Nielsen shows that audiences above 25 have experienced a whopping 84% growth in Twitter adoption over the past 6 months. Also interesting is the 20% growth happening within the 55+ age range, compared to the 16% increase in 2-24 year olds. This slight discrepancy in growth doesn’t mean that younger audiences aren’t interested in Twitter, but suggests that they have already adopted it. (Also, after seeing the age ranges listed on this chart, I now want to see what a two-year old would tweet.)
• Facebook Acquires FriendFeed (Updated) – Facebook has acquired FriendFeed, we’ve learned. We’re gathering details now.At this point details on the acquisition are still very sparse, but it’s clearly a good match. Over the last year or so, Facebook has “borrowed” quite a few of features that FriendFeed popularized, including the ‘Like’ feature and an emphasis on real-time news updates.
• 6 Twitter Directories To Add Yourself To – Everyone is always looking for new ways to get more Twitter followers. Well, one of the best ways to do this is by getting discovered through Twitter directories. There are many out there to choose from and it’s very quick and easy to add yourself to them. So, here are a few to get you started. Feel free to share your favorite (whether listed or not) in the comments.
• What is a Natural Link Growth Profile? | SEO Book.com – 3 Common Link Building Strategies1. spiky. if the spikes are associated with news and viral marketing then that is not a big problem, but if they are sorta bought links, low quality links, etc. then this is sorta the worst way to do it.
  2. linear. not as bad as spiky…but not as good as geometric. this is where a webmaster tries to build the same number of links each month.
  3. geometric. this is where link building starts off slow, but then keeps getting better each month.
• Company Boasts it Sold Twitter Followers to Michael Jackson – With the increasing popularity of social media sites and the power of marketing on them, more and more people have been investing in services which can increase their rankings faster than they could do on their own.One such service is the highly-controversial paid Twitter follower service which has been offered by web promotions company uSocial.net for several months now. Now they’re claiming they’ve had the attention of some of the world’s largest names, including one interesting one in particular.
• Reporting SERP Spam: Know How to Report & Reclaim Your Rankings – Below is a guide about spam results, how to detect them, and finally where to report them. If you want all the links to submit a spammy site, they’re at the bottom (but if you skip all the interesting info you might not know what to look for!).
• NBA star’s Twitter ID crisis rebounds on him and the site | Technically Incorrect – CNET News – The NBA, Players and Twitter. A good mix? Debatable
• Twitter Co-Founder: Attacks Continue to Change in Nature and Intensity – Apparently, we’re not out of the woods just yet. While Twitter itself has been working reliably for most of the day, some third-party applications remain impacted by measures the company has taken to defend against DDoS attacks.

Rohit Bhargava

1. 21% (One Fifth) of Twitter accounts are empty placeholders. These are the percentage of Twitter accounts that have never posted a single tweet. They may either be registered simply to hold a username for later use, or be experimental accounts started up but never used.
2. Nearly 94% of all Twitter accounts have less than 100 followers. In a finding perhaps consistent with the newness of the tool as well as the fact that many people may currently have an account simply to start experimenting with the tool, Sysomos found the vast majority of Twitter users have an extremely low followership.
3. March and April of 2009 were the tipping point for Twitter. During these months, Ashton Kutcher launched his quest to get to 1 million followers faster than CNN, Oprah started using Twitter, and the steady flow of new users to the site continued. For many, it offered a safer and easier way to get their feet wet with social media, 140 characters at a time.
4. 150 followers is the magic number. In a particularly interesting data point from the survey, Sysomos found that Twitter users tended to “follow back” all their followers up until about 150 connections. Then the reciprocation rate fell off dramatically, which seems to indicate that this number may be the crossover point where people shift from using Twitter for more personal use to using it more for “lifecasting” their thoughts and actions to a community of people who they feel varying levels of connection to.
5. A small minority creates most of the activity. A steep curve of a small minority of actively engaged content creators generating most of the activity on a site is common among social networks, but it is steeper and more pronounced on Twitter. 5% of users account for 75% of all activity, and 10% of users account for 86%. This seems to suggest that the site has managed to engage a mass audience beyond those who typically engage with social media.
6. Half of all Twitter users are not “active.” If you take a general description of being “active” on Twitter to mean that you have posted a tweet at some point in the last 7 days (1 week), then the survey learned that 50.4% of all Twitter users fit this category. If you remove the 21% from point #1, this leaves about 30% of users who have an account and have tweeted before, but happen to be inactive now.
7. Tuesday is the most active Twitter day. One of the most useful data points from the report is that it clears up the common question of which day of the week is the best day to tweet something. Sysomos found that Tuesday stood out as the most popular day for tweets and retweets, followed by Wednesday and then Friday.
8. APIs have been the key to Twitter’s growth & utility. In terms of tools that people are using for Twitter, Sysomos found that more than half (55%) of all Twitter users use something other than Twitter.com to tweet, search and connect with others. This may, in part, be due to Twitter’s notorious reputation of failing/crashing, but also is a credit to all the third party applications that have been built on top of Twitter and do their fair share to bring new users to the service.
9. English still dominates Twitter. When exploring Russia as part of a class that I am teaching this summer at Georgetown, one of the barriers we learned about was the difficulty of fitting some Russian language words into just 140 characters. Twitter is, however, extremely English-friendly. As the Sysomos report found, the top four countries on Twitter are all English speaking (US, UK, Canada, Australia). Of these, US makes up 62% of all Twitter users, followed by UK with nearly 8% and Canada and Australia with 5.7% and 2.8% respectively. The largest non-English speaking country on Twitter? Brazil with 2%.
10. Twitter is being led by the social media geeks. This particular finding should likely come as no surprise, but 15% of Twitter users who follow more than 2000 people identify themselves as social media marketers. These individuals are more likely to post updates every day (sometimes more than once per day) and also use Twitter more actively for direct communication.

Bonus Geographical Stat/Quote: “The cities with the biggest Twitter populations are New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, San Francisco, and Boston. Los Angeles is the fastest growing city on the list.”

Download the full report from Sysomos at http://www.sysomos.com/insidetwitter/