Just how big did Reddit grow last year though? Reddit provided those numbers to The Daily Dot who made a handy infographic that charts the Web sites up and downs last year as it grew to the 35 million unique visitors a month giant that it is today.

It’s amazing to see how much Reddit grew last year despite its many setbacks. It’s a true Internet success story that is hardly ever replicated.

We here at WebProNews wish Reddit another great year of growth and hilarious memes.

Cary Leahey, managing director at Decision Economics comments on the anomaly:

“The overall economy lacks oomph and is having trouble creating jobs. Manufacturing is one of the few bright spots in an otherwise disappointing story.”

Equalizing costs are not the only reason for the resurgence in interest. Even though manufacturing is currently only growing slightly faster than the whole of the economy, experts believe that the years following the current economic depression will represent a renaissance era for high-tech and innovation based production efforts.

From aeronautics to robots, high-speed cotton mills, and 3-D model making, this growth will be about change and transformation from what we have done in the past.

Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief at Wired remarks about the upcoming transformations in manufacturing:

“Change is good, and disruption is the ultimate change.”

“We are democratizating the tools of production now…if done right, we can power manufacturing in the 21st century.”

Scott Brown, chief economist at Raymond James in St. Petersburg, Florida adds:

“We’re not firing on all cylinders yet, but we are still moving down the road”

Analyst are watching the Federal Reserve closely and hoping there is still room for more economic stimulus. I know the government currently offers incentives to companies that pursue innovation-based solution to grow their businesses. Hopefully these manufacturing trends will continue as the year progresses and we can move one step closer to realizing a renaissance in American manufacturing.

Imagine being able to find the right expert at the right time, just by searching a database of your companies emails and blogs. If you need to solve a very specific manufacturing issue, just start searching the related data, and bam!, John Smith pops up on your computer.

The concept of social networking within enterprise systems can be invaluable when used properly, and this is what IBM is selling in addition to the actual software. They are teaching organizations how ‘make their world a smallerplace’. Big business has always suffered from the “one hand doesn’t know what the other is doing” syndrome, and IBM is getting at the core of that challenge with this new initiative.

In an era where corporations are busy struggling to keep their employees from being distracted by social networks like Facebook, IBM has embraced the trend and utilized the concept to facilitate business growth. People already understand the technology, and in many cases, are presently using it. With the popularity of social networking in our private lives, it should be a no-brainer to make this work for business solutions.

Just ask Spotify.

Since the f8 announcement of the Facebook/Spotify partnership, Spotify is experiencing a great deal of growth for its music service, to the tune of a quarter of a million users a day. Since the announcement, AppData reveals (via PC Magazine) that Spotify’s subscription total increased from 1 million to 4.6 million users.

Clearly, Facebook users want their music and Spotify is an effective method for receiving it. The service offers three subscription tiers: Free, Unlimited and Premium. It’s not known how many of the new users are choosing the “free Spotify” option, but considering the fact that the Spotify blog issued a post aimed at those who use the free version, it’s easy to imagine many of these Facebook users who are new to Spotify opted for the one that doesn’t cost anything.

From the post, which details how the free service will go:

…from today, there’ll be no more Spotify Open. Everybody who listens to Spotify for free will simply have a Spotify account.

All Spotify accounts come with a 6-month time-limit honeymoon! During this time, there’s no limit to the amount of ad-supported music you can enjoy. After 6 months, you’ll be limited to 10 hours of streaming a month and a 5-play limit for any individual track. Unless, of course, you’ve subscribed by then!

It’s pretty obvious which direction Spotify is steering its users, and that is directly at the paid versions. For those who haven’t yet joined Spotify, but are curious about doing so, you must have a Facebook account to access the service. That news, however, has not been received with open arms, something a comment from the Spotify blog demonstrates quite well:

Well, that’s all very well and good, but you’ve lost my trust, so for now I’m keeping my spotify account and facebook account separate. Which is a shame, because I liked seeing other peoples public playlists. It doesn’t help that you’ve done this at the same time as other facebook dirty tricks are coming to light, otherwise I’d be more inclined to try it out. But for now, I’m not getting into anything I can’t get out of. Now, when are we getting the Beatles and the Red Hot Chili Peppers?

Whatever the backlash, it’s pretty clear based on the growth Spotify has received since the f8 announcement that complaints like the previous do not rule the day, although, maybe they should. But then again, do casual Internet users even worry about privacy; that is, until these issue falls hit closer to home? Doubtful.

Thanks to a Google+ post by Leon Håland, you can see exactly by how much Google+ is outpacing its perceived competitors. In his post, Håland issued a chart that compares the growth of the three social networks, and let’s just say Google+ is doing quite well:

Does this mean the social network domination of Google+ is inevitable? Considering there are over 700 million Facebook members, clearly, that part of the story has yet to be written, but it’s hard to argue with the growth of Google+, either.

Another report that supports Google+’s exponential growth comes from comScore, which says over 20 million people have visited Google+ in 21 days. There’s also a chart that visualizes these numbers, as well as one that shows which region visits Google+ the most:

It would be difficult to think of many sites that reached such a large number in such a short period of time. That said, Google does have a built-in visitor base of more than 1 billion to work with, so there is clearly potential to convert a high number of users to its new social tool – even if it is still invite-only.

In fact, I’m of the thinking that the invites make Google+ all the more attractive, much like it did with Gmail. When you force something on your users — ala, Google Wave — they don’t like it; but when you make the service appear exclusive, the desire to have what others don’t kicks in, regardless if it’s acknowledged or not.

Again, if you couple that with the largely-positive reaction from the tech sector, and Google+ could almost be considered a viral success, as much as a Google product can be viral, anyway. It’s hard to do things quietly when everybody knows your name. Anyway, how about a song to celebrate Google+’s early victories? There’s one that fits this situation perfectly:

Update:

Håland posted another chart, showing how long it took each entity — Facebook, Twitter and Google+ — to reach 20 million users. The differences are staggering, but again, Facebook’s initial period of exclusivity should be considered:

“It means that people are giving us a try, they’re finding a good experience, and they keep wanting to use it,” he said told us.

The increasing market share is likely a result of Bing’s continuous innovations. For instance, realizing the power of location and “deals,” Bing partnered with DealMap in an effort to bring the very best deals to users. Bing deals give users insight into what the best deals are and what deals are trending, all from one location.

Another initiative that Bing is working on is a new approach to personalization. In the past, personalization relied on collaborative filtering, which made determinations based on user preferences. For example, if person A and person B liked the same item, Bing could assume that person A would like other items that person B liked.

While this model has worked in some areas, it lacks efficiency in areas such as breaking news. As a result, Bing is working on Project Emporia, which is powered by its Matchbox technology. This new approach focuses on viewing the Web in the context of a collection of objects called “features,” instead of viewing it as a Web of pages.

“It’s a fundamentally, new approach to how we think about personalizing search and personalizing results,” said Weitz.

Bing is also working to improve social search. Search engines, previously, found it difficult to identify who users were and what their network of friends was. Now, however, social media behavior has helped them to understand these elements and tie them into search.

“Now, we’re able to actually bring that behavior that you do everyday in your normal life into search,” Weitz pointed out.

Although Bing is excited about its recent innovations and its growing market share, it doesn’t consider the other search engines to be losing the battle. Weitz believes that the developments in social search, mobile search, and personalization, actually “expand the pie” for everyone in the search game.

What are your thoughts on Bing’s progress and innovations in the search market? Does Bing have the potential to dominate search market share in the future?

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.)

InsideFacebook.com put together the following chart that shows not only the growths per age category, but also the ratio of males/females coming to the site per age category.  As you can see, Facebook is experiencing a larger growth in female audiences in every age category but 55-65 year olds, where men are growing at a rate of 19%.  Growth is also lowest in age ranges 18-25 because these audiences are likely to be already on the network.

 Do you have any other interesting findings to add? Did any of these growth metrics surprise you?  I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.

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From a report on cnet, here are the results of the Top 5 fastest growing, as Nielsen refers to them, ‘member community destinations’ for the February to February time period.

As with most data there may be questions raised. For instance a common number thrown around about how many Facebook users there are is 175 million but in the US it apparently is 65 million. You don’t see that number quite as often although it is still impressive. The members of the top 5 are quite a bit smaller than even Twitter and 2 of them are not even social media sites. That’s just minor stuff though.

One area I would like to see more detail on is the age ranges that Twitter has their greatest success. I was admittedly surprised at Twitter’s claim that the largest user group of Twitter is aged 34-49. That would appear to be at least an indication that the reason for Twitter’s success is business related. No evidence of that one just an educated guess.

The other element of growth that is making Twitter investors twiddy (that’s giddy in Twitter speak) is the use of mobile phones and devices to access the application. 735,000 unique visitors did so in January of this year. In addition, on just AT&T and Verizon alone there were 812,000 users accessing Twitter via text message.

While some people have even said that Twitter has jumped the shark it appears that even if they did there are a lot people following them despite that prediction. What will happen over the next year is going to be interesting to watch when you consider that even the mighty Facebook has made recent changes that have tipped a hat to the Twitter model. Since imitation is the greatest form of flattery that should be enough to motivate Twitter to have another year of quadruple digit growth. Tweet that!

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This comes 39 days after the site reached 150 million active users early last month. While from some reports, Facebook was adding 600,000 new active users per day in early December, the longer term average was far below that (the dates here, except for the date on the final report, are taken from CNET stories):

• From August 26 to November 3, the site added 20 million users in 69 days, or about 290,000 per day.
• From November 3 to December 18, the site added another 20 million users in 45 days, or a little under 450,000 users per day.
• From December 18 to January 7, Facebook garnered 10 million new members in 20 days, or 500,000 new users a day.
• From January 7 to February 13, the site added 25 million new members in about 37 days, or over 675,000 new members per day.

And since a picture is worth a thousand words, here are the same stats in graphic format:

CNET reports that most of this growth comes from outside the US—and comes with a price. “Server power is expensive, especially overseas,” says CNET. Plus, a lot of these international users generate far less advertising revenue for Facebook than their US counterparts. And overall, the site is still struggling with monetization, with a recent blow setting its projected overall valuation at $3.7B (down from $15B).

Can they find the missing step in everyone’s favorite formula to make money from social networks in time to capitalize on their growth? (You know—step one: set up a social network. Step two: some magic happens. Step three: profit. They use that one in science all the time.) Or will their popularity be their undoing as more and more “expensive” users join?

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