When you arrive at a site that asks you to register for an account before you can access certain content or functionality, does that drive you away?

A recent research report shows that a site that requires users to register does just that, drives users away. On the flipside, the same report shows that about half of all users are attracted by personalization capabilities on a site.

So, on the one hand, we don’t want to register but, on the other, we want personalization.

How can you deal with that in a way that finds a balance between the two? Perhaps social login is the answer.

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Every single day – well, except the weekend – we’re giving away a 1-year Basic Account package, worth almost $120.

This promotion continues and one lucky person every day has a chance to walk away with this catch.

What we do is that each day, at a different time each day, we post a message to one of our social media accounts – Facebook, Google+, or Twitter – with a link containing a discount code.

The code entitles the first person that applies it to a transaction to a 100% discount on a 1-year Basic Package, worth $119.40.

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So what happened with the Internet in 2011? How many email accounts were there in the world in 2011? How many websites? How much did the most expensive domain name cost? How many photos were hosted on Facebook? How many videos were viewed to YouTube?

We’ve got answers to these questions and many more. A veritable smorgasbord of numbers, statistics and data lies in front of you. Using a variety of sources we’ve compiled what we think are some of the more interesting numbers that describe the Internet in 2011.

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Twitter is growing and evolving, and the service clearly wants plenty of new users to join its folds. However, try registering a new Twitter account, and come up with a username that isn’t already registered. You’ll soon find that there’s some serious username depletion going on.

Things wouldn’t be so bad if the person who had already taken your brilliantly though-out nickname was actually using that Twitter account. But take a look around and you’ll find lots of examples of users who clearly have just created a Twitter account, signed in once or twice, and then never used the service again. And since Twitter accounts never expire, that username is now gone for all time.

And it’s not a small problem. Twitter could have more than 100 million unused accounts. In January, Twitter reported that it had almost 200 million registered users, a number that has surely grown significantly since then. In September, Twitter reported that it had 100 million active users (users who sign in at least once a month). Quite a difference.

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Online social networks are everywhere these days, a truly global phenomenon. But where are the different social networks having the most success in terms of popularity? That is what we’ll try to answer in this post.

We have included 11 social networks in this survey: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Orkut, Tumblr, FourSquare, MySpace, LiveJournal, Hi5 and Bebo.

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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.

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Microsoft is one of the largest and most profitable tech companies in the world, but sometimes we can’t help but feel a bit sorry for them.

Why? Because the online community won’t cut them any slack whatsoever. There is so little love shown that it’s scary. If there’s even the slightest chance that something can be blamed on Microsoft, it will.

Whatever the exact opposite of goodwill is, Microsoft has plenty of it.

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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).

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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.

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During and after the earthquake and tsunami disaster in Japan this Friday, local phone networks became overloaded. Not just because of damage to infrastructure, but mainly because the networks simply couldn’t handle the flood of calls and text messages that followed.

This kind of overload is basically what happens around midnight at New Year’s Eve, only much worse, because everyone was worried about family and friends and wanted information as soon as possible.

Internet connections, however, continued to work for the most part, so people turned to social media instead.

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