Twitter Surges Past Digg, LinkedIn, And NYTimes.com

How quickly they grow. Remember when Twitter was just a little pipsqueek, with less than 10 million monthly unique visitors to its site worldwide? That was back in February, 2009. Fast-forward to April, and Twitter’s U.S. visitors alone reached 17 million. Now comScore has released its worldwide numbers and it estimates Twitter’s global unique visitors in April, 2009 was a whopping 32 million, up from 19 million in March, 2009.

To put that in growth into perspective, Twitter has just passed Digg (23 million), LinkedIn (16 million), and the NYTimes.com (17.5 million) in monthly unique visitors, as counted by comScore. And comScore only measures the number of people who visit Twitter’s Website, not the millions more who send and read tweets via their phones, desktop apps, or other Websites. Twitter.com is also now bigger than Bebo and Freindster, for what it is worth. Who will it pass next?

Its getting so big that its growth rate is beginning to temper. In April, Twitter added 13 million visitors, which is more than the 9 million it added in March. Its month-over-month growth rate, however, slowed to 68 percent from 95 percent the month before. Still, if it can keep adding 10 million global visitors a month, it will easily pass 50 million this summer and 100 million by the end of the year. No wonder everyone from Facebook to Google is looking over their shoulders.

Twitter Shies Away From Advertising…

Biz Stone, in a blog post today, gave us a little insight into Twitter’s stance on advertising. There’s been a lot of speculation on how Twitter should and could advertise but Stone lays out a few ways where Twitter could monetize via ads and other methods and notes that the micro-blogging service would prefer to stay away from relying too much on ads, at least initially.

First, Stone says that Twitter sees the inherent value of commercial use of twitter, noting that Twitter is providing enterprises and individuals with viable uses that could be enhanced. Last summer, Twitter CEO Evan Williams said he thought Twitter’s strongest revenue potential would come from charging for commercial use by brands. Other initial ideas for ways to commercialize Twitter include “account authentication, management tools, and discovery mechanisms.” Stone doesn’t find the idea of selling banner ads on Twitter very compelling, but acknowledges the marketing value of twitter in connecting businesses to consumers and is looking to explore this particular avenue.

The best discovery mechanism is search and the obvious business model in search is advertising. But Twitter doesn’t have to make money yet, so it is not ready to commit to a revenue model and clearly wants to take the time find its own way and strategy. The startup knows that it can make money with advertising if it needs to but continues to experiment with different advertising strategies to find the model that’s the best fit. Some of these “tests” include text advertisements on the home page, ads in the stream, and text footer ads. Twitter also serves ads in the small box on profile pages for third-party Twitter apps, but doesn’t seem to charge the apps for the promotion.

Google Analytics Now Providing Data on YouTube Brand Channels

YouTube, tens of thousands of content partners and advertisers have used brand channels to build communities around their videos. Thanks to our large audience and the creative options available to channel owners — such as the new mosaic feature used by Volkswagen — YouTube brand channels are now a vital part of our platform, attracting millions of video views every day. And, as brand channels have grown in popularity, understanding channel visitors and their behavior has become increasingly important to partners and advertisers fine-tuning their promotional strategies online.

Today we are integrating Google Analytics with YouTube brand channels. This will give partners and advertisers a much richer and deeper understanding of their channel’s performance by fully enabling Google Analytics reporting on their channel as if it were their own site. While all uploaders can still use YouTube Insight to learn detailed information about their video views and user engagement, now advertisers and partners with brand channels can get even more information about their audience. Brand channel owners can track metrics such as how long visitors stay, repeat visits, bounce rate, and page views per visitor. For those who want to tailor their videos to a specific audience, Google Analytics also provides data about where viewers are located geographically and what languages they speak.

YouTube is the world’s largest focus group, and a brand channel with a strong following can provide tremendous insights into the consumers who interact with your content and your brand. We’ve been working hard to open up YouTube and give you more ways to analyze data, and we think this integration will help you further improve your brand channel’s performance and understand your audience. If you own a brand channel, start experimenting with Google Analytics today — you’ll discover many more exciting things that you can do with your data.

YouTube Offers Brand Partners Another Carrot: Google Analytics For Their Channels

YouTube, a site that was once notorious for pirated content and user-generated videos that were practically useless to brands, has made great strides in the last few years as it looks to appeal to its growing number of advertisers and content partners. Today the site is adding a new feature that makes the platform even more useful, adding Google’s powerful (and very popular) Analytics reporting to YouTube brand channels, adding some credence to YouTube’s claim that it’s the “world’s largest focus group”.

Before now brands (and general users) could keep tabs on how their videos were performing using YouTube Insight, which has some basic demographic information, tracks a video’s popularity around the world, and shows how your video is being rated by other users. But when it comes to more powerful tracking that’s useful to major websites and brands, it falls short. YouTube says that the addition of Google Analytics will allow them to track far more, with “reporting on their channel as if it were their own site”. From the new YouTube Biz Blog:

While all uploaders can still use YouTube Insight to learn detailed information about their video views and user engagement, now advertisers and partners with brand channels can get even more information about their audience. Brand channel owners can track metrics such as how long visitors stay, repeat visits, bounce rate, and page views per visitor. For those who want to tailor their videos to a specific audience, Google Analytics also provides data about where viewers are located geographically, and what languages they speak.

At this point it looks like the new feature will be limited to major brands and partners, and it’s not clear if it will be released to a more general audience. Most people probably wouldn’t care about such specific analytics, but I’m sure quite a few major YouTube users who aren’t necessarily large brands would be interested.

Yahoo! Adds Voice Search To iPhone App

Not too long ago, Google added voice recognition to their iPhone search application. Not one to be behind the times, Yahoo! has gone and done the same.

Well, that’s what we should have been able to say. Instead, Yahoo’s voice recognition add-on comes nearly 6 months after Google’s. Of course, Yahoo’s application is a bit more complex than Google’s, being that it also handles news, aggregates various social sites, and a good amount more beyond search. That being said, search is Yahoo’s main gig. Combined with the fact that everyone hates typing, Yahoo should have done this ages ago.

Yahoo’s implementation is quite different than Googles – for better or worse.

Back when Google initially launched their app with voice search functionality, it caused a bit of a stir. Google had made use of an API that was generally off limits the app developers. The API they used took input from the iPhone’s proximity sensor, allowing them to tell if the phone was placed near the user’s face. Once the proximity sensor went off, voice recording began. Had Apple let Google slide intentionally, or did the person in charge of reviewing the app just miss the memo that this was a no-go? As with anything on the internet, conspiracy theories were fairly rampant.

Whether they tried to make use of the same API and were denied or they simply chose to avoid conflict, we’re not sure – but Yahoo opted to go with a more traditional push-to-begin, push-to-stop recording method. It’s not quite as slick, but it has an upside: it doesn’t screw up. At least, it doesn’t screw up without an obvious reason (see below.) I’m not sure if the proximity sensor just hates my manly facial scruff or something, but Google’s solution tends to misfire a lot. It’ll detect my face and begin the recording, then stop a second or two later. I’ll pull my iPhone away to see what’s going on, and the sensor will fire off, starting the recording again. Every one of my voice-powered Google iPhone app searches seems to begin with “Wait, damn it, okay ..” This is a little more fool-proof.

On the downside, they placed the Record/Stop record right in the middle of the screen – smack dab where your cheek bone will sit, potentially misfiring the button. This happened to me twice in testing. Holding the iPhone at a slight angle (so that it doesn’t touch your cheek) fixes things.

This recording method could arguably be more user-friendly, but the voice recognition isn’t. Of 3 tests, 2 of which were significantly inaccurate.

Test #1:
What I said: Blah blah blah, blah blah blah.
What Yahoo! detected: Blah blah blah, blah blah blah

Test #2:
What I said:This is a story all about how, My life got flipped-turned upside down
What Yahoo! detected: This is a story of the town of west africa upside down

Test #3:
What I said:This is a test of yahoo voice recognition, test test, 1 2 1 2
What Yahoo! detected: This test of yahoo voice recognition, test, test tube 1 2 4

As you can see from test 1, Yahoo!’s voice recognition is outstanding at picking up “Blah”s. As you can see from test 2, however, it is fairly terrible at picking up the Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air theme. And for test 3? We can see where the “test tube” mistake happened (”Test One Two” kind of sounds like “test tube”) – but where the hell did that “4″ come from?

Oh well – maybe it’s just my crazy exotic Californian accent screwing things up

A Stroll Through Facebook’s New App Directory

As we predicted last night, Facebook’s new application directory and Verified Apps program are now live. We knew about most of the features that were coming with this release, but this is the first time we’ve actually gotten to see what they’ll look like. So what’s new?

The new directory allows users to sort through apps using a number of new categories, including browsing through applications that live off-site (presumably through Facebook Connect), desktop applications, and iPhone apps that use Facebook Connect for iPhone. At the top of the directory is a section for featured items, where Facebook staff can feature some of their favorite applications even if they aren’t the most popular (a similar strategy has been adopted by Apple’s App Store).

Also new is a feed that is incorporated into the directory itself. At the bottom of the page, you’ll notice an area called “Recent Activity From Friends”. This includes updates from all of the third part applications your friends are using, the idea being that it will help you discover new applications that you might be interested in. Given that some of these items are likely appearing in your main News Feed these might be a little redundant, but it should be helpful nonetheless.

Application pages have also been updated to function like standard Facebook “Pages”. This means that users will be able to become ‘fans’ of an App and receive updates from it in their News Feed.

Finally (and what is perhaps the most important addition) are the Verified Apps. The green checkmarks that denote a Verified App are unobtrusive, appearing next to the star rating of an app (I suspect they may be even a little bit too easy to look over). But even if users don’t notice them at first, it might not matter much, because Facebook is clearly favoring them when it presents applications in the directory. Verified Apps get priority in the prominent “Applications You May Like” section, which is sure to drive quite a bit of traffic.

Google Adds Message Translation To Gmail

Gmail Labs just added another nifty tool to its suite of features—message translation. Using Google Translate, Gmail will help you translate any message that you receive in another language into a language you can understand. The feature can be used for 41 languages.

Gmail will suggest a language to translate the message to, and also gives you the option to translate the message to different language.

If your email conversation includes Gmail users, you can have entire conversation in multiple languages with each participant reading the messages in whatever language is most comfortable for them. Google admits that Google Translate doesn’t always get the perfect translation but the feature is helpful to get the general idea of the content of an email.

Jeff Chin, product manager for Google Translate, said that this feature, like many others rolled out of Gmail Labs, uses the “power of cloud computing” to scale this tool to all Gmail users without having to buy servers, install software, or write code that needs to be integrated into each application. Chin adds that the cloud has helped Google Translate process billions of words in several languages to all users. Plus, he says that the application is able to quickly add new languages and updates to users quickly and efficiently.

Gmail Labs also recently added several other useful features, including the ability to import email and contacts, web search in Gmail, and search suggestions.