This report was written by Susannah Fox, Kathryn Zickuhr, Aaron Smith

From the Summary:

Some 19% of internet users now say they use Twitter or another service to share updates about themselves, or to see updates about others. This represents a significant increase over previous surveys in December 2008 and April 2009, when 11% of internet users said they use a status-update service.

Three groups of internet users are mainly responsible for driving the growth of this activity: social network website users, those who connect to the internet via mobile devices, and younger internet users – those under age 44.

In addition, the more devices someone owns, the more likely they are to use Twitter or another service to update their status. Fully 39% of internet users with four or more internet-connected devices (such as a laptop, cell phone, game console, or Kindle) use Twitter, compared to 28% of internet users with three devices, 19% of internet users with two devices, and 10% of internet users with one device.

The median age of a Twitter user is 31, which has remained stable over the past year. The median age for MySpace is now 26, down from 27 in May 2008, and the median age for LinkedIn is now 39, down from 40. Facebook, however, is graying a bit: the median age for this social network site is now 33, up from 26 in May 2008.

It will probably become more difficult to track status updating as an independent activity as social network updates feed into Twitter and vice versa. For now, it is clear that a “social segment” of internet users is flocking to both social network sites and status update services. This segment is likely to grow as ever more internet users adopt mobile devices as a primary means of going online.

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Source: Pew Internet & American Life Project

From the Article:

The University of Florida, Cornell University and a handful of other schools have been awarded $12.2 million to build a social/collaborative network for scientists and researchers. The idea is to make it easier to find research and like-minded researchers in an effort to speed new discoveries.

The project, funded via the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, will initially take of the form of networks within each of the 7 founding schools but within two years could expand across the country. Eventually, the network will go worldwide, grant recipients hope.

[Snip]

Technologies used to support the effort will include VIVO, an open source discovery tool out of Cornell used to search for research information. It will also exploit concepts of the Semantic Web, Tim-Berners Lee’s vision for an even more useful Web that enables better sharing of data.

In addition to the University of Florida and Cornell, also involved in the project are Indiana University, Weill Cornell Medical College, Washington University in St. Louis, the Scripps Research Institute and the Ponce School of Medicine in Puerto Rico.

Source: CIO

From the Report:

The number of adults signing up to social networking sites has almost doubled in the last two years, according to new Ofcom research.

It reveals that 38 per cent of UK internet users now have a social networking site profile – up from 22 per cent in 2007.

At the same time people are also becoming more cautious about sharing their personal information online.

Three quarters of those with a social networking profile now say that it can only be seen by family and friends – up from 48 per cent in 2007.

Source: Ofcom

From the Article:

As employers have moved to crack down on staff using office time to post photos to Flickr or tweet ruminations about their misadventures, the savviest companies have instead mobilized their cyber social butterflies as a key part of business strategy.

And those organizations currently lacking such people have posted help wanted ads for “social media experts.”

“If someone is going to call themselves a social media expert, they’ll say ‘Hey, I know how to use all these different online tools – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube – and harness them for an organization, brand or a company,” said Theodora Lamb, whose title is “community animator” for a website called Thebigwild.org.

Source: The Canadian Press

On the last day of September we ran a brief post about a “coming soon” new feature for Twitter. Well, that didn’t take long. According to this TechCrunch report, Twitter Lists are now available.

From the Post:

The feature allows you to group users you follow together and then lets you share those for others to also follow.

[Snip]

Unfortunately, adding people to your list is not as easy as it should be. The reason for this is that there is no user search functionality. Instead, you have to either go to your “following” page, or to that person’s profile to manually add them.

The remainder of the TechCrunch post offers a step-by-step guide to setting up Twitter Lists.

Have fun!

Today, TweetDeck released a new version (v0.31) of their PC, Linux, and Mac clients. Here is a look at what’s new:

New notification system – Gone is the plain old window, fixed in the top-right corner. Now TweetDeck will show a cool new notification window, with previews of the latest tweets, and the ability to take the standard actions directly from the preview. No more having to open up the screen to reply to a new tweet – now you can reply, retweet and more, all from the popup notification. Plus, you can configure the location of the popup AND set options on a column-by-column basis

Keyboard shortcuts – Navigate around your Tweetdeck rows and columns using the keyboard. Hit Space to open the new HUD menu and access common actions quickly without taking your fingers off the keyboard

New Followers column – You can now add a column to your TweetDeck that shows your most recent 100 new followers. You can follow, unfollow, block, report spam and even add to a group direct from this column

Also, a bunch of bug fixes that you can read about in this post.

If you prefer a video tour, no problem. Here’s the video via YouTube.

Source: TweetDeck
Hat Tip: Mashable

From a Blog Post by Jeff Weiner:

As of early this morning [Wednesday], LinkedIn has 50 million users worldwide and we’re growing that figure at roughly one new member per second. When LinkedIn launched in 2003, it took 477 days — almost a year and four months — to reach our first million members. This last million took only 12 days.

Where are these 50 million users? LinkedIn has been global since inception — about half of our total membership is international. There are now 11 million users in Europe alone. India is currently our fastest-growing country with almost 3 million users, while the Netherlands has the highest rate of adoption per capita outside the U.S., at 30%.

Source: The LinkedIn Blog

In Other News…

Social Networks War Shows Facebook Dominant

Facebook is leaping ahead of MySpace to turn into the most popular social networking site in the U.S. Yet although Facebook nailed down 58.6 percent of all U.S visits to social networking sites in September — for an increase of 194 percent — use of Twitter surged even more astoundingly, according to Experian Hitwise.

[Snip]

Other networking sites, including Twitter, still lag way behind the two lead runners. But Twitter, a site that got only 0.15 percent of all U.S. visits in September of last year, ended in fourth place overall last month with a 1.8 percent share of U.S. visits and a stellar growth rate of 1170 percent.

Source: PC World (via SF Chronicle)

See Also: Facebook Visits Increased 194 Percent in Past Year (via Experian Hitwise)

From the Article:

The popular microblogging service on Thursday launched a Japan-based mobile version, hoping to penetrate a country where other U.S. social networking sites including Facebook and MySpace have failed to capture much ground.

Japanese is Twitter’s sole foreign language platform so far, and the company’s efforts here indicate it’s serious about making it big in Japan — and eventually all over the world.

[Snip]

“It’s an excellent opportunity for us to see where we can go in Asia in general because Japan represents a leading edge, with advanced mobile usage,” said Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, who traveled to Tokyo this week for the launch. “Mobile is in Twitter’s DNA.”

The company will roll out the site in Spanish, German, French and Italian over the next few months, Stone added.

The San Francisco-based company is also using Japan to experiment with ways to make money from features unavailable on its English language site, such as banner ads. It remains mum on how much revenue the ads have attracted so far.

[Snip]

While Twitter already operates a mobile site in English, many of its features are incompatible with Japanese language usage. Instead, many mobile users here had been relying on third-party platforms like “movatwitter.”

Fyi, Mixi is the top social networking site in Japan.

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Source: AP