How We’re Using Social Media on Our Mobile Phones [STATS]

Mobile analytics company Flurry used its January data to look at the top application categories for iPhone and Android device owners. Parallels between the two types of smartphone users are very similar: social networking apps are by far the most frequently used category of apps.

For Flurry’s January report, the company decided to dissect application usage based on the following categories: games, entertainment, social networking, and news and lifestyle.

On both iPhone and Android phones, social networking apps were used most frequently — about 20 times per month — with news coming in a distant second. In fact, in terms of frequency alone, we’re using social networking apps at double the rate we’re using news applications, and four times the rate we’re firing up mobile games. Based on Flurry data, it also appears that the frequency at which we use entertainment, games and lifestyle apps in totality still doesn’t rival how frequently we use social networking apps each month.

It’s interesting to note, however, that in terms of actual session length — duration of individual application usage — smartphone users split larger chunks of their time between news, games and social networking respectively, with users devoting nearly 10 minutes on average to news applications. What it boils down to is that we use social networking apps most frequently, but spend longer periods of time consuming information in news applications.

These findings are especially striking and essentially confirm that social media has become integrated into our lives, so much so that we’re using our smartphones to stay connected while we’re away from our computers. In fact, social media has become more entertaining than entertainment itself.

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Google Deletes Music Blogs, Prompts a Twitter Upheaval

Google has deleted six of the most popular Blogger-based music blogs on the web (including their entire archives) in an effort to combat online music piracy. The move comes in response to Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) take-down notices.

According to The Guardian, the deletions were performed without clear notice, and bloggers are insisting that they did not host any owned content without permission.

The sites shut down were using Google’s Blogger service; they included I Rock Cleveland, It’s a Rap, Living Ears, To Die By Your Side, Masala and Pop Tarts. Each was dedicated to introducing music fans to new songs and genres they might not otherwise experience, usually from obscure and independent artists.

MP3 downloads were often included with blog posts, but bloggers have claimed that nothing they’ve uploaded recently has violated copyright laws. For example, I Rock Cleveland owner Bill Lipold claims that all the MP3s served up on his blog in the past two years were either publicly released promotional tracks or provided by the labels or artists.

The take-downs have angered social media and music enthusiasts, who have started using the hashtag #musicblogocide2010 on Twitter in tweets voicing disapproval of Google’s actions.

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Google’s Response

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Google responded to the outrage with a blog post explaining its DMCA policy. While Google usually gives bloggers a chance to respond to a single DMCA take-down request with a counter-claim, it explained: “When we receive multiple DMCA complaints about the same blog, and have no indication that the offending content is being used in an authorized manner, we will remove the blog.”

That might have been the case with these blogs. However, some bloggers who received lone complaints said they didn’t know how to go about responding with a counter-claim.

The issue is that the DMCA occasionally makes mistakes when sending take-down notices to websites — sometimes it doesn’t realize a site is within its rights to use that particular track — but bloggers feel that Google didn’t give them an adequate chance to defend themselves, and now months or years of blogging history (which is critical for serving readers and good search engine placement) are permanently lost — even if the bloggers are able to get their Blogger blogs reinstated.

Lawyers in the music industry are understandably sensitive about rights issues after the industry was turned on its head by illegal file sharing services like Napster, but they need to be careful not to anger consumers who are enjoying music legally.

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Google Buzz: The Missing Features

Google Buzz isn't even available to all Gmail users yet, but that doesn't mean that we don't already have some ideas for how Google could improve the service. Given how similar Buzz and FriendFeed are, a lot of the current discussion around Buzz feels like déjà vu to old FriendFeed users. In the early days of FriendFeed, for example, we used to have long discussions over how to increase the signal to noise ratio on the service and why FriendFeed should implement a lists feature. Buzz can still learn a lot from FriendFeed.

Here are a few of our ideas for how to make Buzz even more interesting and useful.

ReadWriteWeb's full coverage and analysis of Google Buzz:

• Make it easier to find friends and interesting people and don't assume that my Google Contacts are the people I want to follow: Google assumes that your social network is easily accessible from your Google Contacts, but for a lot of people who use their Gmail account mostly for work or to talk to their families, Google Contacts isn't representative of who they would want to follow on a FriendFeed/Facebook-like service. Google says that it plans to surface items from outside of your contacts that it thinks will be interesting to you, but we have yet to see these on Buzz.





• Lists: Twitter has lists, Facebook has lists, FriendFeed has lists and Buzz should have lists, too. Sometimes, you just want to see updates from your family and sometimes you just want to see what the bloggers you follow on Buzz are saying. Google could just integrate with with Google Contacts (though maybe that just leads to other problems).





• Better Filters: Some people love to share Google Reader posts, others tweet like there is no tomorrow. Google will pull all of these messages into your stream and as of now, you can't tell Buzz to just selectively ignore all Google Reader posts from one person or all the tweets of another without unfollowing all the messages from this person. According to Google, Buzz will automatically weed out posts you are likely to skip. For now, it doesn't seem like it is doing this yet.





• Speed up imports from third-party services: Currently, it can take quite a while before buzz pulls in tweets and shared items from Google Reader. Given how much emphasis Google is putting on the real-time aspect of Buzz, it would be nice if these updates came in a lot faster. Also, because Google seems to import updates in batches, you often get a huge number of tweets or Google Reader shares from one person that takes up most of the space on Buzz.





• Support more third-party services: You can only connect Buzz to a handful of third-party services like Flickr, Twitter and Google Reader. If your Google Profile contains the right links to other services like Yelp, it can also pull this data in as well if you follow these directions. It would also be nice if Google detected more video services when you attach a link to a post. Right now, it will show YouTube videos (and also Flickr photos) when you attach a link, but not videos from DailyMotion or Vimeo.





• Don't clutter our inboxes with new buzzes: By default, Buzz puts notifications about updates and new messages into your Gmail inbox. By the time you follow more than 20 active Buzz users, this can quickly clog up your inbox and drown out your regular email conversations. We shouldn't have to create a special filter with a relatively arcane command (label:buzz) to banish these messages.





• Allow mobile users to set fuzzy locations: As of now, you can either give your followers access to your exact location or not attach any location data to your messages at all. It would be nice if you could just set a town or neighborhood as your location so that you can share where you are, while still keeping your precise location private.

What Else is Missing?

Obviously, Google Buzz is just a day old, so it's only normal that there are still some bugs in the system and that the user experience could use some polishing. If you have used Buzz already, what features do you miss? Let us know in the comments.

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Blog This! (by Google) - Google Chrome extension gallery

Blog This! (by Google) - Google Chrome extension gallery Read more...