Rapleaf sampled 120,000 people who deal with a major email provider (Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, or AOL Mail).  It turns out that, in terms of popularity, Hotmail and Yahoo Mail may be ahead with minors.  Gmail does quite well with young adults.

Then, in the next two age brackets, Hotmail regains the lead, and AOL and Yahoo establish a near-tie.  Finally, as you might have suspected, AOL does indeed rule where older people are concerned.

Rapleaf found fewer differences when it sliced the data according to gender; there’s a pretty even split between male and female AOL and Yahoo users.  Still, it discovered that noticeably more women use Gmail, and men definitely have a fondness for Hotmail.

Rapleaf’s supposed to release more data about the social network memberships and friend counts of these email users in the future.  In the meantime, a hat tip goes to Sarah Perez.

Rapleaf monitored the accounts of 40,000 active Twitter users over the course of a few months.  The company’s Michael Hsu then wrote today, "The most followed users gained followers at a faster rate than less popular users, contributing to a growing ‘popularity gap.’"  Also, "Users in the top 0.1% have around 5x as many followers as users in the top 1% and about 40x as many followers as users in the top 10%."

Here’s his and Rapleaf’s proof:

This might be a sign that celebrities are taking over Twitter.  People would just join the service in order to see what individuals like Shaq and Samuel Halpern are saying, in other words, rather than to sort of look around and branch out as early adopters did.

Or not.  We’d be interested to hear any other explanations you can come up with.  And the good news is that, if you use Twitter and only have 140 or so followers, it looks like you’re still in very respectable territory.

Roughly 80 percent of the people Rapleaf studied had between one and 100 online friends.  In this segment, women had an average of 62 pals, while men had five fewer.  Moving up to the 100-1,000 friend range, the difference remained similar, with women averaging 185 friends and men 172 connections.

 Men, Women Network Differently

The Rapleaf report states, "While we theorize that women spend more time on social networks, building and nurturing relationships, we also theorize that men are less likely to spend as much time nurturing relationships as they are acquiring relationships from a transactional standpoint.  Spending less time on a social network but transacting more equates to having roughly the same number of friends as women, who spend more time on social networks, but are busier sustaining relationships."

It’s only when looking at people with more than 1,000 friends that men took the (slight) lead.  Look for serious businesspeople, musicians, and celebrities in this category; the average person doesn’t have so large an address book.

Rapleaf studied 30.74 million people with at least one online friend, and included networks like Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Flickr, Friendster, Hi5, and LiveJournal, so its results are hard to dispute.  Marketers (and individuals) may come to value online contact with women a little more as a result.

It’s a sort of Facebook versus OpenSocial setup, and thanks to MySpace, OpenSocial’s side wins in terms of a user count; with 11.3 million, MySpace easily outdistances Facebook (with its 2.6 million), as well as its would-be pals hi5 (4.5 million), Friendster (2.3 million), Plaxo (1.3 million), and LinkedIn (0.8 million).

Facebook is ahead with younger users, however – as Richard MacManus notes, “52% of Facebook users are 18-25, whereas 40% of the users are 18-25 for the five container sites on the OpenSocial platform.”  Now, the value of this is debatable – LinkedIn, for example, doesn’t really try to embrace the college crowd – yet from an advertiser’s standpoint, the stat makes Facebook look pretty interesting.

Also interesting (and not necessarily good) is the abundance of men on LinkedIn.  On most other social networks, there’s something like a 60-40 split between women and men, but in LinkedIn’s case, that’s reversed.

One last note from RapLeaf’s report: Plaxo’s users are the most likely to belong to multiple other social networks, while MySpace’s users seem most content to only be in one or two.

Mike Arrington aptly calls it “eBay feedback for the rest of the web, and the offline world.” It’s a simple idea, elegantly executed, with tons of potential, but what I find most interesting are the implications this sort of service has for PR practitioners. Bear with me on this….

Shel Isreal wrote recently about the power of personal brand, specifically, how personal brands are increasingly influencing and shaping our perceptions of various corporate brands. I think you could argue there’s a fine line between “personal brand” and “personal reputation,” they each ultimately represent a subset of qualities and traits that outwardly define you, me, and every other poor sap out there, nothing new here really, however the difference today is that our personal brands, our personal reputations, comes with a degree of permanence and public accessibility — be that for better or worse — thanks to the web.

Case in point, the major search engines, like Yahoo and Google, are crawling and aggregating the bread crumbs of our digital selves, our digital reputations, making this info discoverable to anyone who seeks it, while the vertical search engines, like Technorati and Sphere, are taking it a step further by focusing on blog content and assigning authority and relevancy metrics to that.

To me, RapLeaf’s service seems like the next logical step in this progression, where real-world feedback and offline sentiment can now be combined with algorithmic metrics and online measures to capture and represent one’s reputation. I think the message this sends to PR practitioners, particularly consultants and agency folks, is the obvious one: that you’re the keeper of your reputation, manage it diligently, or face the consequences. Write a bad press release, the world can see it. Send a bad pitch, the world can see it. And if you act unethically, the world can now see that too.

Now, there’s an upside to all this as well, especially in the context of new media. A RapLeaf score has the *potential* to become a unique, at-a-glance qualifier for bloggers, podcasters, etc., who are increasingly being approached, or pitched, by PR folks who might not otherwise disclose their agendas or exercise any degree of transparency. A RapLeaf score could help bloggers and such determine the credibility and trustworthiness of a source, in much the same way that eBay feedback helps buyers and sellers determine who they want to do business with. If this sort of thing was to catch on, the implications for PR would run deep: those that act and operate ethically and responsibly would be largely listened to, and those that don’t, largely ignored. Think about it….

For now, ironically, under the premise of this post and my own RapLeaf score, I exist among the ignored masses, but you can change that, and so can I…;-)

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Mike Manuel is the founder of the award winning Media Guerrilla blog. Media Guerrilla is an insiders take on the practice of technology public relations with a focus on the issues, tactics and trends that are specific to the tech industry.

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