Google’s new social network, Google+, is gaining users at a frenetic pace. Presumably people are signing up for it faster than any new social network in history.

There will be many who bemoan that there’s now yet another social network out there to keep track of. Weren’t there enough already? Don’t Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and all those other sites cover our social networking needs? “I don’t want another social network!”

But here’s the cool thing. The fact that Google+ has gotten some serious wind in its sails (unlike the dead-in-the-water duck that is Google Buzz) will bring something sorely needed to the social space: Competition.

Read more

Protecting one’s brand is pretty much standard practice for large online properties like Facebook. As a result, the social network giant now owns hundreds of domain names, of which only a few are actually used. The rest have been taken over from others for “safekeeping.”

We find it rather amusing that Facebook itself now owns domain names such as:

Read more

Twitter became what it is today largely thanks to a big and very enthusiastic community of third-party developers who built applications on top of the fast-growing service. There were other factors as well, but few would argue that strong support from its developer community hasn’t been key to Twitter’s success.

For developers, the Twitter API has been almost as hot a commodity as the Twitter service itself. So imagine our surprise when we noticed that worldwide interest in the Twitter API seems to have dropped off since mid-2010 (based on search statistics from Google).

Read more

We’ve mentioned the tremendous growth of Facebook at numerous occasions on this blog, and it’s fascinating how fast the social network has risen from being an upstart fighting with MySpace to basically leaving the entire social media landscape behind in the dust.

Since Facebook is now so ginormous (that’s the scientific term for it, right?) we wanted to give you a frame of reference for how big the service has become. And as we so often do, we’ve done it with a chart.

Read more

Although Facebook is by far the largest social network out there, the social network sphere is large and has a ton of players. We were curious about which of them are the most active. To find these sites, we decided to focus on the number of daily visitors to each site.

The number of (unique) daily visitors is an interesting metric since it doesn’t rely on registered users (who may or may not be active) or monthly visitors, where some may visit the site as seldom as once per month. In short, you get a good idea of the day-to-day activity on a site.

Read more

In most countries today, Facebook is either the most popular, or second or third most popular website. The social network has reached such widespread popularity that it can these days only really be compared to Google, the only other company that can brag about a similar reach.

But Facebook isn’t in the top everywhere. There are still several countries where Facebook hasn’t been able to reach a dominant position (at least not yet).

Which countries? Read on to find out.

Read more

User behavior differs greatly between websites. We wanted some hard data on what kind of websites get the most page views out of their visitors, and examined the top 1,000 websites on the Internet to find out.

What we specifically looked at was monthly page views per unique visitor. We calculated this number using traffic data from Google Ad Planner, then sorted the list by that number to create a “page views per visitor” top list.

The results, although not entirely unexpected, are interesting.

Read more

Twitter announced yesterday that they now have more than 145 million registered users. That’s a lot, but how much is Twitter actually being used? Turns out that there’s more activity on Twitter than ever before, and it keeps increasing.

Twitter processed 2.64 billion tweets this August, an increase of 33% over May. Not a bad increase over just a summer. In August, an average of 85 million tweets passed through Twitter every day.

Read more

Facebook recently passed an incredible milestone, 500 million active users. And it keeps growing.

Although Facebook initially focused on the United States, it soon turned its eyes towards the horizon and the rest of the world. And it’s a tactic that’s been working extremely well. Facebook’s current user base is more than 1.6 times the size of the entire US population. If Facebook were a country, it’d be second only to China and India.

And speaking of countries… Now that it’s gone global, which countries have the most users on Facebook?

Read more

That Twitter has been expanding well outside the borders of the United States is well known. It’s becoming a global social media phenomenon and much of its growth is currently coming from this international expansion. We thought it would be interesting to investigate where Twitter is growing the fastest right now.

By looking at traffic data to Twitter.com, we’ve identified several countries where Twitter is currently growing rapidly (this year). These are not necessarily countries that have a ton of Twitter users yet, but rather places where the traffic curve is pointing sharply upwards.

Read more