Just downloaded and installed Flock. This post is to brandUNITY blog using Flock blog editor while facebook is open. brandUNITY blog on http://brandUNITY.com/blogs

eMarketer reports that 25-26% of internet users have a blog they update at least once a month and the number will continue to rise. That’s close to 30 million blogs on the internet updated monthly. An estimated at 96.6 million Internet users read a blog at least once a month.

In other numbers, more women than men are internet users by about 7 million and online usage patterns vary significantly by gender. Men are more prone to using mobile devises, spend more time on busy sites, and make more use of search engines.

Take away –  if the audience is women, make the internet experience less busy and cluttered than that targeted to males. For males, added more reading content, more diversions with advertising, and make provisions for mobile.

http://bit.ly/Y18iT

http://bit.ly/bTWBJ

Among the fastest growing companies durng this economy are social media app developers. The question is, will people playing Mob Wars on Facebook pay real money to get a virtual pistol or bag of cash, winning favors with the Godfather?

Facebook has grown to 200 and 250 million monthly users and earned $300 million during 2008. It has raised more the $400 million in funding and its largest investor is Microsoft at $240 million in 2007 for a 1.6% stake in the company.

Revenue streams come from advertisers. Developer revenues come from advertisers who pay them to create apps that will engage social media users with free games and utilities expressly to increase brand awareness.

One example cited by Money.CNN.com is Vancouver, WA based Papa Murphy’s. A Papa Murphy widget on Facebook gave free pizzas to anyone becoming a “fan”  on the Papa Murphy Facebook page. Users clicked-thru using the widget to the Papa Murphy’s website to get their free pizza coupon.

VentureBeat: MORE>>

Money.CNN.com: MORE>>

Twitter’s ability to distribute information in real-time is what fuels its potential to change the way we communicate. It is particularly effective at communicating immediate occurrences from a vast number of sources. Posted information could include situations that have local, regional, or worldwide impact.

Twitscoop is a third-party app, built by lollicode that collects twits in realtime, ranks them in frequency and by topic to reveal top discussion trends in the moment, and displays them in a word cloud. Software like this, collecting and organizing the realtime information that twitter yields, is a technology trend that is changing the internet and how we use it.

TechCrunch: MORE>>Technorati

We have to agree with the TechCrunch post about the importance of Twitter to the web - posted today by MG Seiger:

“Simply put, we (TechCrunch) write about Twitter so often because right now, it matters. From news organizations to movie stars, from earthquakes to fires, from Facebook to Google — everyone seems to be talking about, to or with Twitter. In an era of mass communication, it is the latest medium. And it’s fundamentally changing the ways in which people interact with others using the web. What you may view as a stupidly simple service with no real point, I view as one of the few inspirational products in bleak times.”

Full post MG Sieger, TechCrunch: MORE