WebProNews

October Marked First Decline For Twitter Visitors In A Year

Before you read any further just lean back and take a deep breath. You are about to enter the “Research Zone”. You know the place well. It’s where we give you shocking numbers that someone has come up with using their “methodology” and it is then used to create shocking headlines around the Internet for your reading enjoyment. It’s almost like having an informant who whispers something in your ear then you get to blab it all over the place and set the masses running.

Data Suggests the 'Connect Program' was the Reason Behind Facebook's Surge

In case you missed it, Facebook is pretty popular. As of June 2008, they’d beat MySpace in terms of total unique visitors worldwide (ballooning to twice as many uniques as MySpace in January 2009)—and even in the US, one of the few Facebook-is-#2 holdouts, Facebook has caught up to MySpace.

July Was a Good Month for Tweeting

It appears that the number of new Twitter users has slowed a bit over the past month, although it's still growing significantly. Regardless, it hasn't prevented the number of Tweets from jumping.

Facebook Dealing With a Click Fraud and Data Access Lawsuit

It’s a saga we’re all familiar with by now: create a pretty awesome web service, start a trend, become a media sweetheart, make lots of money (VC or acquisition), get slapped with a lawsuit. Or two. Or fifty billion. Facebook added two more lawsuits to its heap recently: a countersuit from Power.com and a click fraud proceeding.

The Older Demographic Makes A Large Push On Facebook

The demographic has shifted dramatically over at Facebook and that change could lead to billions in revenue, according to one prominent board member.

Study Shows 18-24 Year Olds Love Social Media, Twitter Not So Much

These two charts say it all really:

Keeping Data Is Good, Says Google

Retaining search data helps Google improve its search results, despite privacy concerns that such retention could end up in the hands of the government via subpoena.

Facebook Joins Data Portability Group

This is pretty big news, it seems to me, after all of the back-and-forth about data being trapped inside Facebook — the social-networking site has joined the Data Portability Group, along with Plaxo and Google, and will now be helping come up with a standard for moving personal data into and out of different networks.

The Data Portability Issue Isn't Going Away

So Robert Scoble has his account suspended by Facebook for using an automated script to harvest his contacts and their email addresses (see my previous post), and all hell breaks loose. Scoble, whose account is later reinstated, is denounced for being a publicity-seeking limelight hog, and for using a script from Plaxo that is an egregious breach of Facebook’s terms of use (since it uses optical character recognition to grab email addresses, which the site keeps as image files).

Who Does This Facebook Data Belong To?

In his post about Facebook disabling his account, uber-blogger and Facebook tart Robert Scoble admits that he was doing something that breached the site’s terms of use — specifically, he was running a script that accessed the social network and “scraped” data from it.