The AP reports that a goat had escaped onto the Pulaski Skyway in New Jersey this morning. Five police officers were called to scene to help catch the goat, but they had no luck for nearly two hours. It appears the goat was rather nimble and kept jumping back and forth over the divider causing problems for both sides of traffic.

Thankfully, nobody was hurt as a result of the goat running along the highway. There was, however, a small accident involving four cars as the drivers were attempting to avoid the animal.

Where did the mischievous goat come from? The police aren’t sure, but its tag did say U.S. Department of Agriculture. They assume that it had somehow escaped from a truck heading to a slaughterhouse.

Here’s some amateur footage of the police trying to catch the escaped goat:

Have you seen less traffic from Google Image Search since the redesign? Let us know in the comments.

Webmasters complaining about changes made by Google is nothing new. Every time Google releases a major algorithm update like Penguin or Panda, the outcry is everywhere. But, like it or not, that’s Google trying to better its algorithm, and ultimately improve its search results. You could also argue that any traffic one site loses, another gains. Somebody wins.

The Image Search story is a bit different, however. This is not an algorithmic change designed to point users to higher quality images or more relevant image results. It’s a cosmetic change, and while some users may find the experience to be an upgrade, it’s clear that many webmasters have not welcomed the redesign.

We got over seventy comments about the changes on a previous article we published. Not many were positive. In fact, most were from webmasters talking about the traffic they lost almost instantly. Here are a few examples:

“55% dropped for websites with images…”

“Google image traffic has dropped by 50-70% on my site…”

We could go on. See for yourself.

That was back in January. It doesn’t appear that things have gotten much better.

Define Media Group published some findings from a recent study on Monday (hat tip to Search Engine Land). According to the firm, you might as well spend your time in other areas of search engine optimization and online marketing, and not worry so much about optimizing for image search anymore.

“We analyzed the image search traffic of 87 domains and found a 63% decrease in image search referrals after Google’s new image search UI was released,” explains Shahzad Abbas. “Publishers that had previously benefitted the most from their image optimization efforts suffered the greatest losses after the image search update, experiencing declines nearing 80%.”

“In the eleven weeks after Google’s new image search was released, there has been no recovery – which means for image search, the significantly reduced traffic levels we’re seeing is the new normal,” he adds. “In the aftermath of the new image search experience, image SEO has been severely compromised, and we have no choice but to recommend deprioritizing image SEO when weighed against other search traffic initiatives.”

Of course, there’s always the chance that your images could turn up in universal search results on Google’s web results pages, but even then, personalized “Search Plus Your World” results tend to get the emphasis when applicable.

It’s all made even more interesting due to the fact that Google pitched the changes as good for webmasters, indicating that they would actually drive more traffic to sites.

“The domain name is now clickable, and we also added a new button to visit the page the image is hosted on,” wrote associate product manager Hongyi Li in the announcement. “This means that there are now four clickable targets to the source page instead of just two. In our tests, we’ve seen a net increase in the average click-through rate to the hosting website.”

“The source page will no longer load up in an iframe in the background of the image detail view,” Li added. “This speeds up the experience for users, reduces the load on the source website’s servers, and improves the accuracy of webmaster metrics such as pageviews. As usual, image search query data is available in Top Search Queries in Webmaster Tools.”

It’s possible that some sites are seeing more traffic from the Image Search changes, and just aren’t being as vocal, but there has been an overwhelming amount of complaints since the redesign, and this new study is not doing anything to defend Google’s case.

Of course, Google is all about placing users first (even over webmasters), and they’ll continue to do what they think is best for them. From a user experience perspective, the changes aren’t bad. But that’s little consolation for those who now have to find other ways to get their content in front of an audience.

Do you see Google’s recent Image Search changes as a positive or a negative? Let us know in the comments.

Should Google kill Google Reader? Will you miss it? Let us know what you think or if you care in the comments.

So here I am back to work. Immediately, I’ve already been using Google Reader like all day. The truth is, I was already using it every day while I wasn’t working as well. That’s because it’s one of the things on the Internet that I use the most. So, you can imagine, I’m not incredibly happy about the news. I mean, I don’t agree with Hitler on many things, but I think he has this one spot on.

A little over a month ago, Google Reader users were experiencing some usability issues with the product, and Google didn’t seem to care much about fixing it quickly. Little did we know at the time that this was a foreshadowing of what was to come.

On Wednesday, Google broke the news to the world. They did so in one of their regular “spring cleaning” announcements. By now, I’m used to these announcements. Usually, they’re about products that I’ve used little or not at all. Occasionally, they included something I used but could live without (like Picnik). Never before have the announcements involved something that I relied upon on a day to day basis.

This is all Google had to say about it in the announcement:

We launched Google Reader in 2005 in an effort to make it easy for people to discover and keep tabs on their favorite websites. While the product has a loyal following, over the years usage has declined. So, on July 1, 2013, we will retire Google Reader. Users and developers interested in RSS alternatives can export their data, including their subscriptions, with Google Takeout over the course of the next four months.

Was it only 2005? I can hardly remember living without Google Reader.

There was a separate post on the Google Reader blog. This was the first post to the blog since October 2011, which announced some Google+ integration. Perhaps that should have been taken as another clue. On the blog, Google software engineer Alan Green wrote:

We have just announced on the Official Google Blog that we will soon retire Google Reader (the actual date is July 1, 2013). We know Reader has a devoted following who will be very sad to see it go. We’re sad too.

There are two simple reasons for this: usage of Google Reader has declined, and as a company we’re pouring all of our energy into fewer products. We think that kind of focus will make for a better user experience.

Usage is declining. I guess that’s not entirely unexpected, given the rise of social media. For the average person, I can see where it wouldn’t be incredibly hard to get by without Google Reader, even if they are accustomed to using it on a regular basis. For people who write for the web, however (which is still a pretty large number of people), there really isn’t another tool out there that does the job as well as Google Reader. At least not yet. Others see the situation as it is, and are working on alternatives, and or promoting their existing alternatives.

There are petitions pushing for the saving of Reader. This one at Change.org has over 100,000 supporters. There are others at Change.org and elsewhere. This one at KeepGoogleReader.com has over 31,000 itself.

The Twitterverse (one of many possible places Google will be pushing users with the killing of Reader) is full of complaints. Twitter, by the way, probably has a lot more to gain from this move than Google+, and many believe that Google’s move is really about Google+. It’s no secret that Google has been pushing to get people using its social network to consume and share content, and clearly, this is where Google’s efforts on this front are focused.

This week, former Google Reader product manager Brian Shih spoke about Google’s move on Quora. Here’s a snippet of what he had to say about it:

It turns out they decided to kill it anyway in 2010, even though most of the engineers opted against joining G+. Ironically, I think the reason Google always wanted to pull the Reader team off to build these other social products was that the Reader team actually understood social (and tried a lot of experiments over the years that informed the larger social features at the company)[1]. Reader’s social features also evolved very organically in response to users, instead of being designed top-down like some of Google’s other efforts[2].

I suspect that it survived for some time after being put into maintenance because they believed it could still be a useful source of content into G+. Reader users were always voracious consumers of content, and many of them filtered and shared a great deal of it.

But after switching the sharing features over to G+ (the so called “share-pocalypse”) along with the redesigned UI, my guess is that usage just started to fall – particularly around sharing. I know that my sharing basically stopped completely once the redesign happened [3]. Though Google did ultimately fix a lot of the UI issues, the sharing (and therefore content going into G+) would never recover.

So with dwindling usefulness to G+, (likely) dwindling or flattening usage due to being in maintenance, and Google’s big drive to focus in the last couple of years, what choice was there but to kill the product?

So, if you want to get your data out of Reader from Google Takeout, you can do so here. You have until July 1. In the meantime, us Google Reader die hards will have to hope Google takes note of these petitions and reconsiders (which is probably unlikely, if we’re being honest), and/or start exploring the alternatives. Lots of people have already compiled lists, including tools like: Feedly, Netvibes, The Old Reader, Bloglovin’, NewsBlur, FlipBoard, Pulse (which LinkedIn is apparently buying), Zite. Oh yeah, and then there’s Google Currents (at least for now), and of course, there’s not even a web version.

Nothing I’ve used so far has been able to match Google Reader in functionality entirely, for my personal purposes. Some are better than others, and I won’t promote any one tool here, mostly because I’ve not settled on one myself. You can be sure that we’ll see more players enter the market in the time leading up to July 1, so the best alternative might not even exist yet. One intriguing possibility is an offering for Digg, who has already come out and said it’s working on one that will mimic Google Reader. That sounds promising. I’d love to see an identical clone, even if it has Digg’s logo instead of Google. This could be Digg’s ticket back to Internet relevance.

Some services, which relied heavily upon Google Reader are just shutting down – namely FeedDemon. Founder Nick Bradbury wrote about the end of the service in a blog post, which he says was hard for him to write. He says:

FeedDemon relies on Google Reader for synchronization, and there’s no decent alternative (and even if there were, it’s doubtful I’d have time to integrate with it, at least not without trading time away from my family – which I won’t do).

That was the nail in the coffin for me. I hate to say goodbye to FeedDemon after a decade of working on it, but it’s time to say goodbye. When Google Reader shuts down on July 1, FeedDemon will also disappear.

Some see the whole thing as a good opportunity for Google rivals like Microsoft and Yahoo to step up to the plate, and fill a void that Google is leaving behind.

Some (including Hitler) have wondered what has happened to Google’s old stance about the open web – something that Google Reader and RSS both cater to. Google has historically been all about this, but doing away with Reader and pushing toward Google+ doesn’t seem to be a move in the same direction. That may or may not make sense from a corporate standpoint, but it’s certainly worth noting. As TechEye points out, Google’s move should make Internet censorship-heavy Iran happy, as many Iranians apparently use reader to get around some of the censorship.

What About Your Web Traffic?

Okay, I think the point has been made about how much this whole thing sucks for users. But there is another side of the coin, for which the outlook isn’t all that rosy either. As RSS feeds are still the primary way a lot of people get their news, that means Google’s move away from Reader has the potential to impact traffic to the sites to which users are subscribed.

Hard core Google Reader users have racked up numerous feeds over the years. You have to wonder how many of the users, regardless of what alternative they transition to, will take all of their feed subscriptions with them. How many sites will lose subscribers over the whole thing. Some users will no doubt elect to just use social media instead of RSS. Will these people bother to subscribe to the Twitter, Facebook or Google+ feeds for all of the sites they were subscribed to? And even if they do, will these sites be pushing out every article to these channels the way they do through RSS?

That brings up another interesting point. Will this move clutter up social media feeds, and lead to a lot more content being pushed from publications through social media channels? A site that only pushed a few articles per day to its Facebook followers may find itself posting every article. Then, of course, there’s another layer to that issue: how many Facebook users are looking at all of the posts from the pages they follow?

Luckily, Facebook is in the process of rolling out changes that at least let users see all of the posts from the pages they follow if they choose to do so. Before, they were filtering that, so there was no guarantee all of a page’s followers even had the opportunity to see a post. Even still, the Facebook functionality is hardly an RSS clone.

According to BuzzFeed, Google Reader is a much larger source of web traffic than Google+ to the network of sites it tracked. Here’s what their chart looks like:

Death Of RSS?

The question of whether or not RSS is dead or dying has been around for years. Naturally, it has resurfaced in light of Google’s news. Is it dead? Clearly not, given the amount of outcry we’re seeing over the death of Google Reader, and the rush for alternatives from other companies. There is demand. It may not be a huge percentage of Internet users, but those that demand it are serious about it and loyal to the format. It’s become as fundamental to the web experience as search and email for some of us. It’s not dead.

Is it dying? That’s not as easy of a question to answer. I want to say no, but Google turning its back on it is not a good sign. Part of me wonders, as I’m exploring alternative means for consuming RSS feeds, if it’s just a lost cause, and I should really be exploring different strategies for news consumption altogether (and don’t get me wrong, RSS is not my only news consumption habit). I don’t think I’m willing to accept the demise of RSS just yet though. If we all do that, then we truly are killing it. To my knowledge, there really isn’t a means of consuming news that is as comprehensive as RSS anyway – at least not one that meets my needs.

Obviously I’ve made no attempt to hide how I feel about Google Reader’s demise, but there are some out there who think it might actually be a good thing. Some journalists have already abandoned RSS. Tech blogger Robert Scoble, once a faithful user, wrote about why he stopped using Google Reader all the way back in 2009. He had some valid points about flaws with Reader back then that still hold true today, but I don’t think many of us would say that Reader is flawless. Sure, there are things that Google could have improved upon, and you can’t rely solely on Reader if you don’t want to miss anything. For many of us, however, it’s just a major piece of the puzzle.

All of this aside, by shutting down Reader, Google is driving people out of its universe, by driving them to alternatives. I find this move baffling, as in many cases, it will no doubt drive users to Google’s competitors. Considering all of the moves Google has made to keep users on Google properties, keeping Google Reader around seems like a no-brainer. Some of us spend a whole lot of time on that Google property. Possibly even more than any other Google property.

While Google Reader may live to July 1, the app is already gone from the Google Play store.

Is Google wise to kill off Reader? Will you miss it? What will you use instead? Is this the beginning of the end of RSS? Share your thoughts in the comments.

lead image via: http://nooooooooooooooo.com/

Wikipedia user West.andrew.g has been looking at the popularity trends of Wikipedia articles over the past few years and has just published those findings in The Signpost, Wikipedia’s community newspaper. He breaks “popular” articles into two categories: isolated popularity and consistent popularity. The latter are articles that simply receive the most traffic, at all times. The top articles on this list include Facebook, United States, YouTube, Google, Sex, Justin Bieber – no big surprises there.

But it’s the isolated popularity of certain Wikipedia articles that’s truly interesting.

If you want your Wikipedia article to experience a surge in traffic, you have to die or play at the Super Bowl.

Five of the top eight biggest spikes (measured in an influx of traffic in a one-hour period) occured due to celebrity deaths – Whitney Houston, Amy Winehouse, Steve Jobs, Osama bin Laden, and Ryan Dunn. Two of the spikes were for Super Bowl halftime shows – Madonna and The Who.

Whitney Houston’s Wikipedia page saw 425.6 views per second during an hour-long period on February 12th, 2012.

Other than deaths and the Super Bowl, other things that can drive traffic spikes to Wikipedia articles are being featured as the subject of a Google Doodle, being a TV show with a concerted “second-screen” effort, and being linked to on a site like reddit (Today I learned…).

[The Signpost via The Verge]

“That’s an all-time high for traffic to the desktop and mobile site and a clear indication that people are looking for local businesses and finding them on Yelp,” said CEO Jeremy Stoppelman in a blog post. “While that number is huge, it doesn’t even include the 9.4 million unique mobile devices that used the Yelp mobile app in January alone.”

“Even more staggering than 100 million unique visitors using Yelp.com in January are the millions of contributions Yelpers made to the community in the same time frame,” he added. “The 4.6 million calls and 5.7 million directions generated through the Yelp mobile app and nearly 2 million bookmarks created by Yelpers are the connection between searching for a specific local business and making a spending decision.”

According to Stoppelman, who cites a recent survey, business owners on Yelp report that the average customer across all categories spends $101.59 in their first visit.

The company has put out this infographic to accompany its impressive traffic news:

Experian Hitwise has also released some data, indicating that Black Friday online retail traffic in the U.S. increased 60% in 2012 copmared to last year, as the top 500 retail sites received over 179 million total U.S. visits.

Ahead of Cyber Monday, the holiday week of online traffic to the top retail site was already up 7% on average, according to the firm. Online retail traffic was down 1% on Black Friday compared to Thanksgiving Day 2012 traffic this year, a spokesperson for Experian Hitwise tells WebProNews.

According to their data (confirming that of comScore’s), Amazon.com remained the top visited retail site on Black Friday while Walmart was the second most visited retail site.

Also noteworthy: BestBuy moved up to the 3rd most visited site while Target was the 4th most visited site, and JC Penney moved up from being the 8th most visited retail site on Thanksgiving Day to the 5th most visited on Black Friday. Among the top 5 sites, the spokesperson tells us, JC Penney saw the biggest day-over-day growth at 26%. The Apple Store saw the biggest day-over-day growth at 99%.

“As we noted from our CEI data that consumer optimism is at an all-time this holiday weekend and retailers could see traffic significant gains for 2012 versus 2011,” the spokesperson says. “Last year Cyber Monday claimed the prize as the busiest shopping day of the year, growing from 138 million online visits to 177 million total US visits to the top 500 Retail sites, a 29% growth comparing 2011 to 2010.”

Last year, he notes, Cyber Monday, Black Friday and Thanksgiving were the top 3 Email Transaction days during the holiday season.

Update: StumbleUpon says its internal data is quite contrary to Shareaholic’s findings.

The trend might be in some part due to the rising popularity of Pinterest, which continues to grow its share.

“Additionally, Twitter now outpaces Stumbleupon’s share of traffic by .22%,” says Shareaholic’s Janet Aronica. “StumbleUpon recently unveiled a new site design and Pinterest-like ‘lists’ feature which enables content consumers to curate collections of articles they enjoy – but publishers will still have to see if this results in click-throughs and traffic directly to their sites.”

“If you’re monetizing through ads and sponsorships, you know that pageviews matter,” adds Aronica. “Any time you’re considering traffic from StumbleUpon, though, you should remember that everything is wrapped in an iFrame, so people may be clicking through to read your articles, but they may not be clicking through directly to your site. Therefore those pageviews aren’t recorded as referral traffic. As with all content creation, remember that the best-in-class, most compelling content truly wins. If you peak someone’s interest at first stumble, they’ll likely find a way to explore your site some more. For example, they may copy/paste your URL into the address bar so they can see more of your content, in which case they would be counted as direct traffic – not referral traffic from StumbleUpon.”

You can read what StumbleUpon had to say about the iFrames earlier this year here.

Meanwhile, it looks like the company is looking to send some traffic back to its own site, as it has removed the Explore Box from the toolbar, making it so that users have to go to StumbleUpon.com to access the feature, which is essentially the StumbleUpon equivalent of search.

We’ve reached out to StumbleUpon for comment on the traffic decline, and will update accordingly.

“The noPhoto isn’t just freedom; it’s a decidedly American version of freedom. It’s a microprocessor controlled, 100% made in the USA, professionally engineered license plate frame designed to do one thing – let you drive like you were meant to. Here at noLimits, we believe that you have a right to go about your daily business without being constantly monitored and watched,” says the company.

The noPhoto is a digital license plate frame that the company claims will be the end of traffic tickets doled out by traffic cameras.

The concept behind the device is pretty simple. The frame features a “high performance sensor” that detects the flash of a traffic cam. As soon as that happens, the frame sends out two strong flashes of light that basically blind the camera, making a driver’s license plate number unreadable.

“Yes, the noPhoto reacts fast enough,” they say. Check out their product video below:

Here’s how bright noPhoto can light up your license plate, according to the company:

Sounds good, right? Sticking it to the man, one avoided ticket at a time. But you’re probably thinking that there’s no way this is legal. noLimit Enterprises says it is:

“Since there is nothing physically covering or obscuring the license plate, the noPhoto does not violate any license plate cover laws. Quite literally, we are using the same light and the same bulbs that red light and speed cameras do. The noPhoto does not cover any state names, and there are no laws in existence regulating how much light is cast onto the license plate.”

No law is existence yet.

The project is current in the crowdfunding phase. According to its page on indiegogo, it’s raised a little over $13,000 of an $80,000 goal with 17 days left in the campaign.

[h/t Mashable]

Do you consider StumbleUpon to be an important source of traffic? Let us know in the comments.

This feature also happens to be, in my opinion, the best part of the new StumbleUpon in terms of user experience. It’s called “Slide”. StumbleUpon’s description of the feature is as follows: “An innovative new feature that adds another dimension to the Stumbling experience. Every time you Stumble, you’ll see a small preview ‘slide’ of the full Stumble that loads in the background. You can decide to immerse yourself in a Stumble longer or swipe through multiple Slides to quickly browse content recommended for you.”

It really does make using StumbleUpon more enjoyable. It speeds up the whole experience, as you don’t have to wait for a page to load before determining whether or not you want to read it or look at it longer. At the same time, that’s where things might get a little trickier for content providers hoping to get some traffic from StumbleUpon.

It’s possible that this feature could decrease StumbleUpon referrals for publishers, as Stumble-happy users quickly browse through previews, sidestepping the actual pages.

“The page needs to fully load for it to count as a page view (and the page starts to load the instant the Slide appears),” StumbleUpon’s new VP, Product, Cody Simms, tells WebProNews.

The page does start to load with the preview, but it’s quite easy to “slide” away from a page well before it’s fully loaded. To me, this means publishers hoping to maintain or acquire traffic from StumbleUpon will need to pay more attention to their titles and imagery than ever before.

That’s exactly what the preview consists of – an image and a title (and the category to which the page has been submitted). Titles and images have always been key factors in StumbleUpon success. Not the only key factors, and not necessarily factors in all cases, but let’s put it this way: having a really catchy title and a really visual page is usually not something that has hurt content on StumbleUpon in the past. It’s just that now, these elements are pretty much the only way to grab the user’s attention from the preview slide.

Still, the title’s the only part you’ll really have full control over, when it comes to the preview (unless you submit the article to StumbleUpon yourself – then I suppose you have control over the category as well). As for the image, Simms tells us, “We use an algorithm to determine the best image/thumbnail to display. If there isn’t a quality image we generate a screenshot of the page. Content providers have no control of this.”

It’s hard to say how StumbleUpon’s algorithm determines which picture is the best, but some guesses would be actual image quality, relevance to the title, and perhaps alt/title text. Again, these are just guesses, as they are obvious elements that can be applied to images. In general, it’s good to implement these elements into your content anyway. Still, if your content has multiple pictures, it’s anybody’s guess which StumbleUpon might choose to display.

So that leaves the title. Having a compelling title has always been important in grabbing users’ attention regardless of the channel from which the audience is consuming the content. It just happens to be more important to the StumbleUpon channel now. In the past, you could actually get a way without having an obvious title on your page, as long as the page was interesting enough to catch the user’s eye. Now, it’s one of the only things you have to catch the user’s eye before they swipe on to something else.

Now, if all of that sounds like StumbleUpon is going to become less useful to publishers as a traffic generator, I’m not going to go that far. There’s still plenty of traffic-driving potential here.

On our previous article on the new StumbleUpon, a reader commented, “Stumbleupon used to be a big traffic driver that has become less relevant over time. This new page preview feature will make them even less relevant to online publishers. I think stumbleupon is forgetting that publishers are one of their core constituencies as well. They can help promote StumbleUpon. Do I want StumbleUpon buttons on my web pages? Not sure if I do anymore.”

My response to that was that I disagree that StumbleUpon is less relevant, as plenty of sites are still getting a great deal of traffic from it. While I do wonder what impact the preview feature will have, I don’t think it will render StumbleUpon irrelevant. As long as StumbleUpon can keep users around, sites generating good content will benefit, and StumbleUpon has actually improved the user experience in this case (granted, there are other elements missing from the new app, such as the Explore Box, but the company assures us that it will be back in a future update).

Simms makes a great point about StumbleUpon referrals as related to the new preview feature.

“We believe that Slide helps ensure users have intent to view the page they clicked on and could potentially result in higher engagement,” he says.

StumbleUpon referrals have faced criticism in the past regarding the quality of the page views, due to the semi-randomness of StumbleUpon. For example, if you’re serving ads or selling something, how many of these random viewers are actually going to convert?

This was already debatable. I say “semi-randomness” because content is targeted based on users’ interests, sometimes more specifically than others, depending on what exactly the user is stumbling through). We had a discussion about the quality of StumbleUpon traffic with social media consultant Brent Csutoras from Kairay Media a few weeks ago. Here’s an excerpt from what he had to say:

“You have to remember that the way StumbleUpon’s system works, when your content gets traction, it will get waves of traffic for years to come,” says Csutoras. “For instance, if one of your articles gets a 15,000 visitor spike, you will see that the trail off on that traffic never really goes away. This is because as your content gets popular in StumbleUpon, it queues up for the people who have subscribed to the category applied to your content. Users are only shown the content one time each, but some users may not be that active or their queue is really full.”

“Fast forward a few months when there might be another 10,000 people who have signed up for that category,” he adds. “As those inactive users log in over time and vote up your content, it will again start to gain traction again and potentially go popular showing to all those active members who have signed up since the last time it was popular. So you might see another 7,000 visitor spike months later.”

“This cycle has the potential to repeat for all your content forever,” Csutoras says. “In addition, if enough people tag the content with another category, it can cross over and become visible to a whole different segment of people. This is the beauty of StumbleUpon and why people who have been using it regularly love it.”

“Lastly, StumbleUpon has done a great job over the last year in defining associated categories, allowing more people who might likely appreciate your content see it, even if they are not subscribed to the exact match category.”

As far as the Slide feature goes, you can still thumb up/down content based on the preview, without having to wait for the actual page to load. So, even if you don’t get a page view out of it, its still possible that the user can give it a thumbs up (presumably based on your title/imagery), and give it a chance to be shown to more users, which could actually lead to more page views.

By the way, while the new StumbleUpon is only on iOS so far, consider that Apple just broke its own record for iPhone pre-orders.

Do you think the Slide feature will have a negative or positive effect on your StumbleUpon traffic? Share your thoughts here.

But not all social media sites are created equal when it comes to driving retail traffic. That’s the message coming out of a a new study from RichRelevance. The ecommerce personalization company looked at over 700 million “shopping sessions” and found that Facebook is still the king, but Pinterest has one notable plus.

According to the study, Facebook drives the most traffic to retail sites – plain and simple. Facebook was found to drive 85.8% of online shopping sessions, followed by Pinterest at 11.3% and Twitter at 2.9%.

And shoppers that comes from Facebook stay on the site longer and come back more often. Facebook referrals stay for an average of 7 pages per session, compared to 4 with Pinterest and 3 with Twitter. Facebook-referred customers had a conversion rate of 2.63%, much more that shoppers who came via Pinterest and Twitter (.93% and 1.09%, respectively).

What Pinterest is really good at, they say, is sending big spenders to retail sites. The average order for a buyer referred via Pinterest was $168.83, compared to $94.70 (Facebook) and $70.84 (Twitter).

“Every social network promises a new way of connecting consumers with retailers and brands,” said Diane Kegley, CMO of RichRelevance. “However, the big take-away from our research is that not all channels in the social space are created equal.”

Check out their infographic on the study below:

[via AllFacebook]