During Super Bowl XLVI, the top trending searches were Madonna and the Halftime Show. Those were followed, in order, by the Patriots, Tom Brady, and the Giants. It appears that the Queen of Pop really did steal the show, despite an attempt by M.I.A. to overshadow it.

And just how were people searching? According to Google, more so on their mobile devices than ever before. Searches pertaining to Super Bowl commercials were performed only 25% of the time on a mobile device before the game. But during the game, 41% of ad searches came from mobiles.

Throughout most of the game, Tom Brady dominated the field of other players when it came to searches. But just about the time that Eli Manning completed that amazing pass to Mario Mannigham, he took the lead and never looked back – both in the game and in search volume.

One interesting term that saw a huge spike in searches was “super bowl live stream,” which spiked right before kickoff on both desktop and mobile devices.

Check out Google’s infographic about Super Bowl searches both before and during the game:

Facebook has announced some interesting stats along with the IPO, including:

We had 845 million MAUs as of December 31, 2011, an increase of 39% as compared to 608 million MAUs as of December 31, 2010.

Our users generated an average of 2.7 billion Likes and Comments per day during the three months ended December 31, 2011.

Facebook also announced a whopping $3.7 billion annual revenue, $1.8 billion in operating income and $1 billion net income.

Also interesting, Zynga was mentioned in the S1 24 times, appropriately since the company accounted for approximately 12 percent of Facebook’s revenue last year.

Investor’s will be interested in this warning contained in the document:

“We currently generate significant revenue as a result of our relationship with Zynga, and, if we are unable to successfully maintain this relationship, our financial results could be harmed.

In 2011, Zynga accounted for approximately 12% of our revenue, which amount was comprised of revenue derived from payments processing fees related to Zynga’s sales of virtual goods and from direct advertising purchased by Zynga. Additionally, Zynga’s apps generate a significant number of pages on which we display ads from other advertisers. If the use of Zynga games on our Platform declines, if Zynga launches games on or migrates games to competing platforms, or if we fail to maintain good relations with Zynga, we may lose Zynga as a significant Platform developer and our financial results may be adversely affected.”

Here’s the accompanying letter from Mark Zuckerberg:

Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission — to make the world more open and connected.

We think it’s important that everyone who invests in Facebook understands what this mission means to us, how we make decisions and why we do the things we do. I will try to outline our approach in this letter.

At Facebook, we’re inspired by technologies that have revolutionized how people spread and consume information. We often talk about inventions like the printing press and the television — by simply making communication more efficient, they led to a complete transformation of many important parts of society. They gave more people a voice. They encouraged progress. They changed the way society was organized. They brought us closer together.

Today, our society has reached another tipping point. We live at a moment when the majority of people in the world have access to the internet or mobile phones — the raw tools necessary to start sharing what they’re thinking, feeling and doing with whomever they want. Facebook aspires to build the services that give people the power to share and help them once again transform many of our core institutions and industries.

There is a huge need and a huge opportunity to get everyone in the world connected, to give everyone a voice and to help transform society for the future. The scale of the technology and infrastructure that must be built is unprecedented, and we believe this is the most important problem we can focus on.

We hope to strengthen how people relate to each other.

Even if our mission sounds big, it starts small — with the relationship between two people.

Personal relationships are the fundamental unit of our society. Relationships are how we discover new ideas, understand our world and ultimately derive long-term happiness.

At Facebook, we build tools to help people connect with the people they want and share what they want, and by doing this we are extending people’s capacity to build and maintain relationships.

People sharing more — even if just with their close friends or families — creates a more open culture and leads to a better understanding of the lives and perspectives of others. We believe that this creates a greater number of stronger relationships between people, and that it helps people get exposed to a greater number of diverse perspectives.

By helping people form these connections, we hope to rewire the way people spread and consume information. We think the world’s information infrastructure should resemble the social graph — a network built from the bottom up or peer-to-peer, rather than the monolithic, top-down structure that has existed to date. We also believe that giving people control over what they share is a fundamental principle of this rewiring.

We have already helped more than 800 million people map out more than 100 billion connections so far, and our goal is to help this rewiring accelerate.

We hope to improve how people connect to businesses and the economy.

We think a more open and connected world will help create a stronger economy with more authentic businesses that build better products and services.

As people share more, they have access to more opinions from the people they trust about the products and services they use. This makes it easier to discover the best products and improve the quality and efficiency of their lives.

One result of making it easier to find better products is that businesses will be rewarded for building better products — ones that are personalized and designed around people. We have found that products that are “social by design” tend to be more engaging than their traditional counterparts, and we look forward to seeing more of the world’s products move in this direction.

Our developer platform has already enabled hundreds of thousands of businesses to build higher-quality and more social products. We have seen disruptive new approaches in industries like games, music and news, and we expect to see similar disruption in more industries by new approaches that are social by design.

In addition to building better products, a more open world will also encourage businesses to engage with their customers directly and authentically. More than four million businesses have Pages on Facebook that they use to have a dialogue with their customers. We expect this trend to grow as well.

We hope to change how people relate to their governments and social institutions.

We believe building tools to help people share can bring a more honest and transparent dialogue around government that could lead to more direct empowerment of people, more accountability for officials and better solutions to some of the biggest problems of our time.

By giving people the power to share, we are starting to see people make their voices heard on a different scale from what has historically been possible. These voices will increase in number and volume. They cannot be ignored. Over time, we expect governments will become more responsive to issues and concerns raised directly by all their people rather than through intermediaries controlled by a select few.

Through this process, we believe that leaders will emerge across all countries who are pro-internet and fight for the rights of their people, including the right to share what they want and the right to access all information that people want to share with them.

Finally, as more of the economy moves towards higher-quality products that are personalized, we also expect to see the emergence of new services that are social by design to address the large worldwide problems we face in job creation, education and health care. We look forward to doing what we can to help this progress.

Our Mission and Our Business

As I said above, Facebook was not originally founded to be a company. We’ve always cared primarily about our social mission, the services we’re building and the people who use them. This is a different approach for a public company to take, so I want to explain why I think it works.

I started off by writing the first version of Facebook myself because it was something I wanted to exist. Since then, most of the ideas and code that have gone into Facebook have come from the great people we’ve attracted to our team.

Most great people care primarily about building and being a part of great things, but they also want to make money. Through the process of building a team — and also building a developer community, advertising market and investor base — I’ve developed a deep appreciation for how building a strong company with a strong economic engine and strong growth can be the best way to align many people to solve important problems.

Simply put: we don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services.

And we think this is a good way to build something. These days I think more and more people want to use services from companies that believe in something beyond simply maximizing profits.

By focusing on our mission and building great services, we believe we will create the most value for our shareholders and partners over the long term — and this in turn will enable us to keep attracting the best people and building more great services. We don’t wake up in the morning with the primary goal of making money, but we understand that the best way to achieve our mission is to build a strong and valuable company.

This is how we think about our IPO as well. We’re going public for our employees and our investors. We made a commitment to them when we gave them equity that we’d work hard to make it worth a lot and make it liquid, and this IPO is fulfilling our commitment. As we become a public company, we’re making a similar commitment to our new investors and we will work just as hard to fulfill it.

The Hacker Way

As part of building a strong company, we work hard at making Facebook the best place for great people to have a big impact on the world and learn from other great people. We have cultivated a unique culture and management approach that we call the Hacker Way.

The word “hacker” has an unfairly negative connotation from being portrayed in the media as people who break into computers. In reality, hacking just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done. Like most things, it can be used for good or bad, but the vast majority of hackers I’ve met tend to be idealistic people who want to have a positive impact on the world.

The Hacker Way is an approach to building that involves continuous improvement and iteration. Hackers believe that something can always be better, and that nothing is ever complete. They just have to go fix it — often in the face of people who say it’s impossible or are content with the status quo.

Hackers try to build the best services over the long term by quickly releasing and learning from smaller iterations rather than trying to get everything right all at once. To support this, we have built a testing framework that at any given time can try out thousands of versions of Facebook. We have the words “Done is better than perfect” painted on our walls to remind ourselves to always keep shipping.

Hacking is also an inherently hands-on and active discipline. Instead of debating for days whether a new idea is possible or what the best way to build something is, hackers would rather just prototype something and see what works. There’s a hacker mantra that you’ll hear a lot around Facebook offices: “Code wins arguments.”

Hacker culture is also extremely open and meritocratic. Hackers believe that the best idea and implementation should always win — not the person who is best at lobbying for an idea or the person who manages the most people.

To encourage this approach, every few months we have a hackathon, where everyone builds prototypes for new ideas they have. At the end, the whole team gets together and looks at everything that has been built. Many of our most successful products came out of hackathons, including Timeline, chat, video, our mobile development framework and some of our most important infrastructure like the HipHop compiler.

To make sure all our engineers share this approach, we require all new engineers — even managers whose primary job will not be to write code — to go through a program called Bootcamp where they learn our codebase, our tools and our approach. There are a lot of folks in the industry who manage engineers and don’t want to code themselves, but the type of hands-on people we’re looking for are willing and able to go through Bootcamp.

The examples above all relate to engineering, but we have distilled these principles into five core values for how we run Facebook:

Focus on Impact

If we want to have the biggest impact, the best way to do this is to make sure we always focus on solving the most important problems. It sounds simple, but we think most companies do this poorly and waste a lot of time. We expect everyone at Facebook to be good at finding the biggest problems to work on.

Move Fast

Moving fast enables us to build more things and learn faster. However, as most companies grow, they slow down too much because they’re more afraid of making mistakes than they are of losing opportunities by moving too slowly. We have a saying: “Move fast and break things.” The idea is that if you never break anything, you’re probably not moving fast enough.

Be Bold

Building great things means taking risks. This can be scary and prevents most companies from doing the bold things they should. However, in a world that’s changing so quickly, you’re guaranteed to fail if you don’t take any risks. We have another saying: “The riskiest thing is to take no risks.” We encourage everyone to make bold decisions, even if that means being wrong some of the time.

Be Open

We believe that a more open world is a better world because people with more information can make better decisions and have a greater impact. That goes for running our company as well. We work hard to make sure everyone at Facebook has access to as much information as possible about every part of the company so they can make the best decisions and have the greatest impact.

Build Social Value

Once again, Facebook exists to make the world more open and connected, and not just to build a company. We expect everyone at Facebook to focus every day on how to build real value for the world in everything they do.

Thanks for taking the time to read this letter. We believe that we have an opportunity to have an important impact on the world and build a lasting company in the process. I look forward to building something great together.

Check out the filing in full:

FacebookInc-20120201-S1-0

This comes just under two weeks after Larry Page announced that the network had reached 90 million users. Page said that 60% of those users engage daily and 80% of them engage weekly. So according to him, we’re not talking about a majority of dead profiles here.

According to Paul Allen’s estimates, Google+ has grown more the 10% in 13 days. This bodes well for future growth, as he predicts that by the end of 2012, Google+ will be a monster:

Meanwhile, I think it’s noteworthy that Google+ membership has grown more than 10% since Jan. 19th when Larry Page announced 90 million users. I have them at 100.8 million users by the end of the day. They have been growing by more than 750,000 new users per day since the 19th, based on analysis of users with hundreds of different surnames. If that rate holds steady, Google+ will end the year with 345 million users. But as I have said before, Google has many dials and levers to use this year to increase signups and usage, including its Android 4.0 rollout. I stand by my prediction of at least 400 million users by the end of 2012.

You can check out his full rundown of why he thinks Google+ will hit 400 million users here. Allen’s methodology for estimating user data involves tracking surname popularity among U.S. Census Bureau data and comparing it with Google+. He then extrapolates a sample out to non-U.S. users. More on that here.

If anything, his previous estimates have been conservative. Before Larry Page’s announcement, he predicted that Google+ would hit 85 million users by February 1st.

These totals are indeed impressive. It probably helps that as of now, a Google account sign-up means a Google+ sign-up automatically.

Apparently, Google+ is more than just the thing that prompts Gmail users to ask “What the f*ck is that up there?” (See below)

Are you seeing more people you know on Google+? If so, are they engaged in the service? Let us know in the comments.

The U.S. Census Bureau releases cool statistics around big events like the Super Bowl, Thanksgiving, Halloween, and Fourth of July. The series, called Facts For Features, highlights interesting data regarding some aspect of each event. And for this year’s Super Bowl, The Census Bureau has decided to give us an overview of the cities involved – through specific figures.

First up, New York:

• 1st
  Where New York ranked on the list of the nation’s most populous cities. The population of New York in 2010 was 8,175,133.
• 33.4%
  Percentage of New York residents 25 and older who had a bachelor’s degree or higher in 2010; 79.6 percent had at least graduated from high school. The respective national figures were 28.2 percent and 85.6 percent. The percentage in New York who have graduated from high school did not differ significantly from the percentage for Indianapolis.
• 38.7 minutes
  Average amount of time it took New York residents to get to work — 22.7 percent of the city’s workers drove to work alone, 5.0 percent carpooled and 55.7 percent took public transportation. Nationally, it took workers an average of 25.3 minutes to get to work. The percentage of New York workers who drove to work alone and the percentage taking public transportation were significantly different from the national average and Indianapolis.
• 49.2%
  Percentage of New York residents 5 and older who spoke a language other than English at home. The national average was 20.6 percent.
• $48,743
  Median household income for New York. The national median was $50,046. The figure for New York was not statistically different from the national average.
• $504,500
  Median home value of owner-occupied homes in New York. The national median was $179,900. The figure for New Yorkdiffered significantly from that for Indianapolis.

Now, for Boston:

• 22nd
  Where Boston ranked on the list of the nation’s most populous cities. The population of Boston in 2010 was 617,594. The Patriots actually play in suburban Foxborough, Mass., which had a 2010 Census population of 16,865.
• 44.3%
  Percentage of Boston residents 25 and older who had a bachelor’s degree or higher in 2010; 85.8 percent had at least graduated from high school. The respective national figures were 28.2 percent and 85.6 percent. The percentage in Boston who had at least a bachelor’s degree was significantly higher from the percentage for Indianapolis.
• 28.4 minutes
  Average amount of time it took Boston residents to get to work — 38.3 percent of the city’s workers drove to work alone, 7.3 percent carpooled and 32.8 percent took public transportation. Nationally, it took workers an average of 25.3 minutes to get to work. The percentage of Boston workers who drove to work alone and the percentage taking public transportation were significantly different from the national average and Indianapolis.
• 35.5%
  Percentage of Boston residents 5 and older who spoke a language other than English at home. The national average was 20.6 percent.
• $49,893
  Median household income for Boston. The national median was $50,046. The figure for Boston was not statistically different from the national average.
• $369,600
  Median home value of owner-occupied homes in Boston. The national median was $179,900. The figure for Boston is significantly different from that for Indianapolis.

And finally, for the host city, Indianapolis:

• 12th
  Where Indianapolis ranked on the list of the nation’s most populous cities. The population of Indianapolis in 2010 was 820,445.
• 26.7%
  Percentage of Indianapolis residents 25 and older who had a bachelor’s degree or higher in 2010; 83.8 percent had at least graduated from high school. The respective national figures were 28.2 percent and 85.6 percent.
• 22.2 minutes
  Average amount of time it took Indianapolis residents to get to work — 82.6 percent of the city’s workers drove to work alone, 9.2 percent carpooled and 1.8 percent took public transportation. Nationally, it took workers an average of 25.3 minutes to get to work.
• 12.7%
  Percentage of Indianapolis residents 5 and older who spoke a language other than English at home. The national average was 20 percent.
• $38,502
  Median household income for Indianapolis. The national median was $50,046. The figure for Indianapolis is statistically different than the national average.
• $118,100
  Median home value of owner-occupied homes in Indianapolis. The national median was $179,900.

Looking for more Super Bowl coverage? Check out news from the social media and advertising side of the big game here.

As part of those earnings, they also reported that during the quarter, they sold 37.04 million iPhones. That number sounds huge (and it is), but once you get to talking about tens of millions, things become a little abstract.

So think about it this way: Every day, there are more iPhones sold than babies born…worldwide.

Once you take that 37.04 million sold during the quarter figure and divide it by the 98-day period in question, you get that Apple sells about 378,000 iPhones every day. The average birth rate worldwide clocks in at 371,000 a day.

As The Next Web points out, birth rate is always a moving figure and Apple’s Q4 returns were bolstered by the holiday shopping season – but damn. That’s one hell of a comparison.

While fascinating, that comparison is rather arbitrary. This comparison, however, is truly astonishing:

Apple has come to represent one of the biggest companies in the world. This infographic, courtesy of MBAOnline, explores the differences and similarities between the edible apple and the not-so-edible Apple.

Surprising similarity: The iPhone 4S weighs about as much as an average apple.

Also, if you think 400 varieties of Apple products is a lot, you’ll be interested to learn that there are over 7,500 varieties of apples in the world.

Enjoy the full infographic below:

According to WebHostingInfo, GoDaddy did see a very slight loss of total domains across the month of December, including high profile sites like Wikipedia and Imgur, their global market shares actually increased steadily as the month went on. While the gains were slight, it was more than enough to offset the defections of domain owners from GoDaddy. Yes, there was a minor dip in their market share for the first of December but that was way before GoDaddy started getting all that negative press for their SOPA support so it can hardly even be considered noteworthy to this context.

Looking at the weekly data of global market shares is like reading an abbreviated version of domain owners’ thought bubbles:

November 28, 2011 – “GoDaddy. Internets. So full now.”

December 5, 2011 – “Burp.”

December 12, 2011 – “Feel better now.”

December 19, 2011 – “Yawn. Nap maybe? Mm’hmm.”

December 26, 2011 (SOPA press starts to pick up steam) – “Oh. SOPA? Soup on. Coupon! Space look pretty tonight.”

January 2, 2012 – “Hangovers such super something something. GoDaddy? Mmm, yes, have some.”

Seriously, for every defector that saddled up with new domain registration services someone either transferred their domain to GoDaddy or else just registered a new domain with them. While GoDaddy lost a sizable amount of domains after the great SOPA revelation of Christmas weekend, the loss was entirely offset by the total amount of domains gained after the news of their SOPA support broke.

In the end, what does any of this mean? Well, for one, GoDaddy’s global market shares grew a little despite all the SOPAness of last month meaning the number of people registering domains outside of the U.S. might be considerable enough that GoDaddy doesn’t need to worry about any losses States-side. The second conclusion you can draw from this data, and perhaps more disheartening, is that there’s plenty of people registering domains in the U.S. that simply don’t give a toss about GoDaddy’s politics. Supposing the second conclusion is valid, don’t expect any volte-faces from GoDaddy the next time they find themselves in possession of an unfavorable opinion – they’re not going to lose. So rather than quickly change their mind so as to appease the unsettled masses, expect the domain registrar to lean back, prop their feet up on the desk and casually reply, “Do you see care anywhere on my face?”

Because you likely won’t.

From GWI:

When we looked into it further, we didn’t find anyone else who had any type of figures and Google has been suspiciously quiet since their Q3 financial statement that gave us that 40 million user number.

We did find, however, anecdotal evidence that supports GWI findings on the active Google+ user base. Firstly, there was this conversation with Don Dodge, a Developer Advocate at Google, where he states that “Any numbers you’ve heard are way low.” There are also people such as Paul Allen who are tracking the numbers of last names on Google+ to estimate subscriber figures. Allen says that Google+ subscriber numbers were growing at 2 million a day in September 2011 based on his methodology, meaning there are much more than 40 million Google+ users.

Back in September, the aforementioned Paul Allen used his model to estimate that Google+ had 50 million users.

In November, he estimated that Google+ was attracting 349,000 new users daily.

If Google+ really has broken the 150 million active user mark, where does that place it in the realm of other popular social networks? According to GWI, in third place wordwide:

There have been a few things that have happened with Google+ that could explain the meteoric takeoff. YouTube and Google+ became more integrated, for one. YouTube got the Google+ hangouts feature, and Google+ got the YouTube search feature built onto the main stream page.

Google+ launched Pages for businesses, which has thus far been a success. Allen attributes the uptick in new signups to the pages launch.

Google also built Google+ signup into its brand new Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich OS. The Galaxy Nexus just launched with ICS, and many other Android devices are in queue for an upgrade.

As Google continues to push Google+ and build it into all aspects of Google, the user count will only climb higher. Is it possible that by this time next year, Google+ could be closing in on Facebook-type numbers? Let us know in the comments.

The Committee to Protect Journalists has the grim task of tracking the number of journalists and other media workers that are killed each year around the world. CPJ Executive Director Joel Simon explains the importance of keeping track of this gruesome information:

CPJ’s mission – grounded in international law – is to fight for the rights of all journalists to report the news freely, without fear of reprisal. Our list of journalists killed is a key advocacy tool in this struggle. We routinely use it to confront governments with their own record of indifference or ineptitude, as we’ve done recently in Pakistan, Mexico, and Russia.

Their data for 2011 was released earlier today and while it wasn’t the deadliest year on record it certainly wasn’t a low-risk one, either. CPJ provided an interactive graphic that details the fine statistics of the 43 journalists were killed throughout the world with 19 of them murdered.

From CPJ’s analysis:

CPJ’s survey identified significant changes in the nature of journalist fatalities. Sixteen journalists died while on dangerous assignments, many of them while covering the chaotic and violent confrontations between authorities and protesters during the uprisings that swept the Arab world. The victims included Hassan al-Wadhaf, a Yemeni cameraman shot by a sniper while covering antigovernment protests in Sana’a, and Ahmad Mohamed Mahmoud, an Egyptian reporter gunned down while filming a protest in Cairo. “Journalists working in this environment are in no less danger than war correspondents covering an armed conflict,” said Ahmed Tarek, a reporter for the Middle East News Agency who was assaulted by police while covering protests in Alexandria, Egypt. “The greatest danger journalists are facing today in post-revolution Arab countries is the targeting of journalists by political forces hostile to anyone who exposes them.”

For the second year in a row Pakistan topped the list of most dangerous places for journalists as 7 were killed while reporting from that country. With all that has happened in the Middle East year during the Arab Spring, it probably won’t surprise anyone that 7 out of the 10 deadliest countries for a reporter to be working are located in that region. The grisly violence directed to journalists wasn’t isolated only to that region, though, as the 4th deadliest place in the world for journalism was Mexico, most likely due to the surmounting violence associated with the Zetas drug cartel.

While CPJ keeps track of the death toll of journalists in the past year, this data does not include the journalists that were beaten and severely injured while in the line of duty. Including those statistics, journalism becomes mutates into an even more dangerous profession.

According to the data, Google+ received more than 6.8 million total U.S. visits (excluding mobile traffic) during the week ending on November 12th. That’s their third best week since launch. Of course, the two best weeks for Google+ occurred around the time Google opened the social network to the public in September.

Comparing month to month, Google+ traffic increased 3% in October. Not only did traffic increase, but average time per visit increased as well – a solid 15% from September’s figures.

Adding to the positive trends is the share of return visitors, which is on an upswing. Defined as visitors who have come to the site in the last 30 days, the returning visitors share increased 18% in the first two weeks of November, as compared to October. In the week period ending on November 12th, 74% of traffic to Google+ consisted of returning visitors.

Another interesting finding was that Google continues to rely on Google properties to refer traffic to Google+, even more so in the recent month. Google properties made up 73% of upstream traffic last week, up from 65% during that massive week in September when they opened it up to the public.

Of course, this uptick in traffic has an obvious explanation- Google+ Pages. By opening up the service to brands, Google has let in a group that they hope will put a lot of effort into building a presence (discover more on how to make a Google+ page and tips for your business).

Figures emerged earlier this week that say 61% of the top 100 brands have quickly adopted Google+ pages. But only 13% of brands displayed a link to that Google+ page on their homepage (compared to 53% when it comes to links to Facebook). Maybe that will change with the unveiling of Google+ badges.

Last night, Google announced the new Google Music, complete with a Music Store run through the Android Market. Part of the new Google Music focuses on sharing with Google+. When you buy a song, you can share it with your followers on Google+ – who in turn can listen to the entire song for free one time. Same goes for albums, and all of this appears right in your Google+ stream.

Are you still interested in Google+? How much do you think brand pages and Google Music integration will help the social network? Let us know in the comments.