The Social

Every once in a while, you read something on Twitter that's just pitch-perfect, despite (or maybe because of) the microblogging service's 140-character limit.

Today's honor is bestowed upon numbers guru and "Web Analytics: An Hour A Day" author Avinash Kaushik, currently employed as Google's analytics evangelist.

On Monday, he posted a total zinger, framing it as an "OH," or overheard, indicating that he wasn't the one who actually came up with the contents of the Twitter message (or "tweet") but didn't want to openly quote the person who actually said it.

"Social media is like teen sex," Kaushik tweeted. "Everyone wants to do it. No one actually knows how. When finally done, there is surprise it's not better."

Wham, bam, thank you ma'am. (Do you agree? Comment away!)

(Credit: Compete.com)

Unless you have been inhabiting the underground bunker formerly occupied by Dick Cheney, you've probably seen loads of press coverage over a "25 Things About Me" Internet meme that was spreading on Facebook. Basically, members would create a Facebook "note" containing 25 facts about themselves, and then "tag" 25 friends encouraging them to do the same.

Yes, it was a bona fide phenomenon, but I avoided writing about it, because I thought the whole thing was...dumb. Internet memes of that nature have been around since goodness knows when. Breathless press hype over it seemed a tad silly.

But here's something legitimately interesting. Analytics firm Compete.com says that there may actually have been a boost to Facebook traffic as a result of "25 Things," at least in the U.S.: 60 percent more Facebook profiles were created in January than in December. That's not surprising, because Facebook still requires a user account to access all its content--curious newcomers who read about "25 Things" would need to register for accounts in order to explore it.

More noticeably, U.S.-based traffic to Facebook's "notes," normally one of the social network's quieter features, skyrocketed. Four times more visitors than usual hit up the notes feature in January, according to Compete, with 28 percent of Facebook's U.S. users checking them out. (The wildly popular photo-album feature usually draws 60 percent of visitors, for comparison.)

The caveat is that Facebook continues to grow fast and so some of this could be attributed to natural growth rather than "25 Things" momentum. That said, Facebook's U.S. growth has long since started to stabilize--three-quarters of its new users now come from overseas.

Compete has said that its analysts will be posting a blog entry about this later in the week, ideally with some more insight into just how much those annoying "25 Things" lists really did catch on. I've also pinged Facebook to see if they have any internal numbers on the topic.

Here's what'll be interesting to see, at least from my perspective: Will this mean that the newfound popularity of "notes" will last? I post photos, links, and other share-able items to my Facebook profile all the time, but I think I've written a Facebook note a total of once (to alert my friends list that I'd lost all their phone numbers in a personal-electronics mishap). Note-writing always struck me as something that was a little bit too promiscuous for the mainstream Facebook user, the sort of thing that navel-gazing, overshare-prone Twitterers would spring for but which didn't fit in quite as well with the directory-like nature of the social network.

Guess I was wrong. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, after all, likes to say that Facebook has incrementally made the Web's masses more comfortable with sharing more and more information. The success of "25 Things," consequently, must be one of his great triumphs. And now he knows all these useless facts about so many millions of people.

Heaven forbid: Facebook notes could be like a gateway drug to blogging for everyone.

This post was expanded at 9:51 a.m. PT.

It's sort of cute, really: blogger Robert Scoble went on a nice snowy stroll with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg while the two were in Davos, Switzerland, for the World Economic Forum. Of course, he wrote about it.

Most of what Scoble wrote about his conversation with the young CEO is either information that was out there already or tidbits like the fact that Zuckerberg was teaming up with former British Prime Minister Tony Blair to work the coat check at the World Economic Forum's annual Women's Dinner (aww!), but there was one fairly interesting part: apparently, Facebook is doing some extensive research into tracking user sentiment, and it has a lot of data on hand but isn't yet sure how it will be used.

"Facebook is, he told me, studying 'sentiment' behavior," Scoble wrote. Keep in mind that he's not actually quoting Zuckerberg, so this may be a bit general. "He said that already, his teams are able to sense when nasty news, like stock prices are headed down, is under way. He also told me that the sentiment engine notices a lot of 'going out' kinds of messages on Friday afternoon and then notices a lot of 'hungover' messages on Saturday morning. He's not sure where that research will lead."

We've had a peek at this already with Facebook Lexicon, the social network's trend-tracking search feature. It also sounds a lot like what some people are suggesting as a signature use for Twitter and may explain Zuckerberg's apparent onetime interest in acquiring the microblogging company.

More importantly, this is basically confirmation (via Scoble, of course) that Facebook has significant amounts of intricate data on hand that it hasn't released yet. It may sound creepy, and privacy advocates may be wringing their hands already, but for Facebook, this could be a quick answer to the profitability question.

NOTE: As it turns out, Zuckerberg was participating on Friday in Davos forum, along with Microsoft's Craig Mundie, YouTube's Chad Hurley, Adobe Systems' Shantanu Narayen, and others. The live Webcast has come and gone, but it looks like an archived version might show up eventually on this World Economic Forum Webcast page.

Facebook likes to trumpet the value of "trusted referrals"--recommendations and ads with the endorsements of members of your friends list. But a new study from Jupiter Research, commissioned by analytics company BuzzLogic, says that consumer purchases are more likely to be influenced by what they read on a blog versus what their social-networking rosters recommend.

Half of all those surveyed who identify as "blog readers" (people who read more than one blog per month, a fifth of total survey respondents) say that blogs are important to them when it comes to making purchasing decisions. But they don't necessarily find them to be all that reliable: only 15 percent of blog readers, and five percent of all those surveyed said that in the past year they had trusted a blog to help them make a purchase decision.

That's still higher than the number of people who said they used social-network recommendations, though: ten percent of "blog readers," and four percent of all those surveyed.

Results of the survey are similar when it comes to advertising: a quarter of "blog readers" say they trust ads on blogs that they read (versus 43 percent on "familiar" or mainstream media sites), but a slightly lower 19 percent say they trust the ads on social networks.

So what does all this mean? Well, it's good news for BuzzLogic, which tracks blogger influence for clients and has seen blog advertising pushed aside a bit on Madison Avenue in favor of "appvertising" and social ads. Aside from that, the real take-away point is that the results seem to indicate most blogs are less mainstream than you might think: Only a fifth of respondents say they read a blog at least once a month.

That's actually really surprising--or maybe blogs have become so ingrained on the Web that people don't even know they're reading them.

Here's a deal that never could've happened in the absence of the developer platform craze: SocialMedia, a media network that focuses on the fledgling niche of "engagement ads," is set to announce a partnership with BuddyMedia, which creates branded applications for clients.

More specifically, SocialMedia clients will have access to BuddyMedia's new analytics and research product, which it calls "BuddyBrain" and formally launched last week. BuddyMedia licenses BuddyBrain as part of a program that it calls "App-vertising Resellers," and the two companies have already teamed up on ad campaigns for clients like FedEx, Anheuser-Busch, and sneaker company New Balance. Terms of this deal were not disclosed.

BuddyMedia launched its own ad network for social-network applications in April.

Right now, social advertising is the talk of the town in New York because of the Web 2.0 Expo this week and the Interactive Advertising Bureau-sponsored Advertising Week next week. There's still plenty of unproven idealism surrounding the niche, and deal-making like this doesn't assuage occasional industry concerns about social advertising's effectiveness. But analytics will likely be a boost for SocialMedia's clients--if they get statistical hints that their Facebook applications are having a legitimate impact, their confidence in the new medium could get a little less shaky.

Media6Degrees, a firm that provides data on social-network activity to marketers and advertisers, announced Thursday that it has raised $9 million in venture funding in a Series A round led by U.S. Venture Partners.

The New York-headquartered company had already received seed funding from Contour Venture Partners, Coriolis Ventures, and a number of angel investors.

According to its Web site, Media6Degrees uses "patent pending algorithms and methods (to) connect a brand's existing customers with user segments composed entirely of consumers who are interwoven via the social graph." The company is helmed by Joe Doran, former general manager of Microsoft's Ad Center.

"Media6Degrees is revolutionary," Tim Connors, general partner at U.S. Venture Partners, said of the investment. He'll be joining the company's board along with fellow venture partner Ted Maidenberg. "It is the first company we have seen to tap the potential of social data for advertisers."

Revolutionary or not, it isn't the only player in its field: a few other social-media analytics companies have emerged in the past year or so, all promising to make some sense of the messy blog-and-Twitter show.

Facebook is announcing later on Thursday a complete revamp of the analytics system it offers to developers for measuring the performance of their applications on its platform. It's more extensive than the company's recent decision to switch from publicly reporting daily use to monthly use.

It'll be officially announced on the Facebook developer blog.

The new analytics are available only to the developer who created a given application, not to Facebook's general membership of 90 million. They'll be available under a "Features" tab in the application's page, and they will index "canvas page views, clicks on profile boxes, confirmation of Feed forms, and the adding and removing of bookmarks" in a way that can be fitted into custom graphs.

The update doesn't change much for the developer experience, so it's unlikely to be a controversial move. The average Facebook application creator will probably appreciate having the stats available.

In part, the move is a way of helping developers transition to the newly redesigned Facebook profile pages, which some have criticized for making developer applications less visible by putting most of them on a separate "Boxes" tab. Others have applauded the slick new design for making the profile interface less cluttered.

Did your site's Alexa ranking change overnight? That's because on Thursday, the chart-friendly Web analytics company announced an overhaul of its rankings system.

Alexa, according to a company announcement, now "aggregate(s) data from multiple sources" rather than just the surfing habits of those who'd installed its browser toolbar.

"Alexa toolbar users' interests and surfing habits could differ from those of the general population in a number of ways, and we described some of those possible differences on our Web site," the announcement explained.

TechCrunch's Duncan Riley, for example, pointed out that the "old Alexa" statistics had TechCrunch's "reach" comparable to the news powerhouse Drudge Report, which has now taken a considerable lead.

Because of the new method of tabulating analytics, Alexa data now goes back only nine months. The company says it is "recalculating historic traffic data and will continue to add it over the coming weeks."

It might have been fine back in 1998 for Alexa, bought shortly thereafter by Amazon.com, to track traffic only from users who manually installed a piece of software. But a decade later, it's led to punchline status and a reputation for unreliability--and more competition.

Rivals such as Compete.com, as well as more formal analytics firms (read: ones where you can't just type in a few URLs and get a pretty graph) like Hitwise and ComScore, have tightened the market.

Even with the new rankings system, Alexa would not allow me to rank Alexa.com alongside other sites, specifically Compete.com. But Compete.com would: It shows that a year ago, Compete was far behind Alexa in traffic, but now the two are neck and neck.

Collective Intellect, a Boulder, Colo.-based analytics firm that specializes in crunching the discussion on blogs, forums, and social networks, announced Wednesday that it has netted $6.6 million in Series B venture capital. The investment round was led by Grotech Capital Ventures and included funding from Crawley Hatfield Capital as well as existing investors Appian Ventures and Croghan Investments.

With the fresh cash, Collective Intellect said it will beef up its marketing and sales campaigns to pull in more clients and revenue. The company's Series A round, $2.6 million in February 2006, was led by Appian Ventures.

Social-media analytics firms have been emerging recently as advertising turns an eye to the likes of MySpace.com and Twitter as an alternative to "traditional" Internet advertising, with the added possibility of uber-targeting along with social networks' reputation for being where the Web's "cool kids" currently reside. Facebook has even released its own rudimentary analytics feature, called Facebook Lexicon.

At the same time, there's the common knowledge that marketing campaigns on social networks aren't exactly cash cows. Whether or not specialized analytics firms like Collective Intellect are actually any good at boosting those ad dollars--it's really still too nascent a field to tell--there are probably more than a few nervous advertisers who want to make sure they don't miss this bandwagon.

That whole "Facebook" thing is a pretty big deal, after all.