Our top story this week was about bad news for the big guys: Google, Facebook, Digg’s top users. As you catch up on the news, be sure to watch the conversation about China, tech and democracy that took place between activist/artist Ai Weiwei, Twitter’s Jack Dorsey and ReadWriteWeb’s Richard MacManus. We also continued our exploration of the significant Internet trends of 2010, including Real-Time Web, Mobile Web and Internet of Things.

Note: We’ve refreshed the format for our longest running feature, the Weekly Wrapup. It now focuses more explicitly on the key trends that ReadWriteWeb is tracking in 2010, as well as giving you the highlights from the leading story of the week. Let us know your thoughts on the new format.

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Story of the Week: Nexus One’s woes, spies love Facebook, top Diggers lose power

• Oops: Google Denied Trademark on Android Nexus One
• Big Changes Are Coming to Digg: More Power to Publishers, Less Power to Top Diggers
• How US Government Spies Use Facebook (Updated)
• Cartoon: Can’t Go to SXSW? We Feel Your Pain
• Nexus One Flopped, but Android Didn’t

More coverage and analysis from ReadWriteWeb

Announcing the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit

Join us for the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit on May 7 in Mountain View, California as we explore the latest mobile development trends, both the technology and the emerging business applications. Be a part of the discussion on geo-location services, augmented reality, native app vs. browser-based, commerce and marketing, mobile social networking and the Internet of Things. Sponsorship enquiries: sales@readwriteweb.com,

Register now for the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit and get early bird rates – only $295.

Mobile Web

• Microsoft Updates Bing iPhone App and Removes It from All International iTunes Stores
• Blockbuster Brings New Releases to Android, Windows Mobile Phones
• Mobile App Marketplace: $17.5 Billion by 2012

More Mobile Web coverage

Internet of Things

• Internet of Things Explained (Video)
• 6 Ways to Better Living: Inside an Internet of Things Home
• 8 Ways to Better Understand the Internet of Things

More Internet of Things coverage

Check Out The ReadWriteWeb iPhone App

We recently launched the official ReadWriteWeb iPhone app. As well as enabling you to read ReadWriteWeb while on the go or lying on the couch, we’ve made it easy to share ReadWriteWeb posts directly from your iPhone, on Twitter and Facebook. You can also follow the RWW team on Twitter, directly from the app. We invite you to download it now from iTunes.

Real-Time Web

• OneRiot Brings Its Real-Time Ads to the Web
• Why Wikipedia Should Be Trusted As A Breaking News Source

More Real-Time Web coverage. Don’t miss the next wave of opportunity on the Web supported by real-time technology! Get ReadWriteWeb’s report, The Real-Time Web and its Future.

ReadWriteStart

Our channel ReadWriteStart, sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark, is dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs.

• The Death of the Pageview
• Micropayments and Subscriptions: How Business Models for Startups are Shifting
• 6 ReadWriteStart Lists: Our Best Startup Advice

ReadWriteEnterprise

Our channel ReadWriteEnterprise is devoted to ‘enterprise 2.0′ and using social software inside organizations.

• Provider Fail: Vodafone Sells HTC Smartphone Loaded With Malware
• Google Apps Offers Migration for Microsoft Exchange

ReadWriteCloud

Our channel ReadWriteCloud, sponsored by VMware and Intel, is dedicated to Virtualization and Cloud Computing.

• IBM Makes A Major Move Into The Cloud; Amazon Is In Its Sights
• Rulers of the Cloud: Will Amazon’s Computing Fabric Become a New Economy?
• The Oracle Effect: Sun’s Best and Brightest Move On to New Places

That’s a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

Discuss

In continuing to look at the way that Facebook has become a driving force behind online news consumption, Heather Hopkins of Hitwise has dove into the numbers again, this time examing how Facebook users compare with others in return visits.

According to Hopkins’ article, Facebook not only drives a high amount of traffic, higher than Google News, but its users are far more loyal, as well.

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Hopkins took a look at the data earlier this month, noting that Facebook drives three times as much traffic to broadcast than Google News, and now we find that these users are also repeat offenders. That is, they don’t just visit once, they come back for more. From the Hitwise blog:

Hitwise data indicate that visitors from Facebook are more loyal to News and Media websites than are visitors from Google News. In particular, among the top 5 Print Media websites in the week ending March 6, 2010, 78% of Facebook users were returning visitors compared to 67% from Google News. The figures are almost identical for Broadcast Media, with a 77% returning rate for Facebook compared to 64% for Google News.

Why do we care about this metric? Because “visitors aren’t as valuable if they don’t come back. Advertisers and retailers need some assurance that visitors will return again and again.” Hopkins notes that even visitors from Google.com, often the leading source of traffic to these sites, are outpaced by those from Facebook when it comes to return visits. But why is this?

Hopkins doesn’t get into the “why” behind the numbers, but we’d be willing to wager that it has something to do with a few reasons. First, content posted by peers is more likely to be compatible with an individual’s world view. Second, their trust in friends as sources might lead them to return for more.

Google, on the other hand, can give great results just the same as it can lead you to the most worthless pages you’ve imagined. It doesn’t offer that one thing we can all trust – the valued opinion of a friend. It’s also possible that the friend making the recommendation in the first place is a return visitor who repeatedly recommends the articles they read.

Whatever the reason, the numbers tell us one thing for sure – news outlets need to focus on making sure it is as easy as possible for readers and viewers to share content on Facebook. Or, as Hopkins so succinctly puts it, “with recent Pew Research showing that Newspapers have seen ad revenue fall 26% during the year and 43% over the past three years, understanding where to find loyal readers is becoming increasingly important.”

Discuss

Internet users who click on links posted on Facebook that lead to news and media websites are more loyal to those portals than those coming from Google News, according to new data from Hitwise.

Among the most popular top 5 print media websites for the week ending March 6, 78 percent of Facebook users were returning visitors compared to 67 percent from Google news. The same was true for broadcast media, with 77 percent returning for Facebook compared to 64 percent for Google News.

Heather Hopkins, Senior Online Analyst, Hitwise, collected the numbers using clickstream data. The metric reports the percentage of visits by source (i.e. Google, Yahoo! Google News, Facebook, etc) that were new versus returning. New visitors are defined as those that haven’t visited the site within the past 30 days.

"Interestingly, visitors from Google are less likely to be returning visitors than average for either Google News or Facebook," said Hopkins.

"This reinforces the long term value to News and Media organizations of working with the likes of Google News and Facebook."
 

Here’s an idea for you: instead of slowly amassing followers, like on Twitter, or carefully culling your friends list over time on Facebook, making sure everyone is in their appropriate list and category, collect and dispose of friends like you ask for the time or a spare cigarette on a busy city street.

That’s what Lokast, the self-described “disposable” social network lets you do – carry your throw-away lifestyle over into the digital world.

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The LoKast iPhone app was released earlier this week at the South By South West festival in Austin and is the perfect app for finding yourself among throbbing masses of the technologically inclined. But what is this disposable thing? From the email we received this week on the app’s release:

Disposable? Yes. That means unlike Facebook which is friends and family, this app is about finding random people in close range and being able to share and see parts of their public digital profile including downloading their public-share videos, music and pictures. The best part, is that after you’re in that close range, you may never see them again. IE: Disposable.

According to the press release, the name is short for “local casting”, as opposed to broadcasting, and “aims to eliminate the need for physical media sharing, thereby eradicating physical CDs, plastic cases, video DVDs or waiting to get back to a PC computer to share and experience content.”

We have to agree that SXSW seems like the perfect venue for this type of app and we’d say why not give it a shot? We haven’t made it all the way downtown yet to be close enough to give it a full whirl, but it looks more than capable from toying with it.

Now, the thing is, we can’t see a lot of people using this outside of big, hi-tech cities or conferences. Where does this fit into our day to day life? Are we really going to run around town staring at my screen trying to see if someone else with the same app is nearby? We don’t think so. For now, though, we’d say give it an install and run around collecting some demos and see what people are listening to.

Discuss

Although the "thud" wasn’t verified until this afternoon, it seems that an online giant fell a couple of days ago.  According to new data from Hitwise, Facebook managed to beat Google in terms of visits between March 7th and March 13th, becoming the most visited website in the U.S. for the week.

The graph visible below makes the changeup pretty clear (blame the sloppy enlarged bit on us, not Hitwise).  What’s more, it doesn’t look like Facebook’s going to relinquish its lead anytime soon.

Heather Dougherty explained, "The market share of visits to Facebook.com increased 185% last week as compared to the same week in 2009, while visits to Google.com increased 9% during the same time frame."

Then here’s one more interesting fact, courtesy of Dougherty: "Together Facebook.com and Google.com accounted for 14% of all US Internet visits last week."

Anyway, this development represents a major win for Facebook.  The ability to represent the social network as the number one site should count for a lot as corporate representatives talk to advertisers and investors, and could result in a direct boost in revenue.  A further snowball effect in terms of user interest might occur, too, since most people like to be part of something that’s popular.

Facebook may be denying any wrongdoing, but a California judge is disagreeing with the social networks’ disagreement to the tune of a $9.5 million dollar settlement today.

The Los Angeles Times reports that the settlement comes in response to a class-action lawsuit over Facebook’s Beacon program that published what users were buying.

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The decision allocates $6 million of the settlement to a “digital trust fund” that will go to organizations that study online privacy, says the Times article. The Times explains the bit of controversy hovering around this final decision:

Over the objections of privacy advocates, Facebook will have a seat on the fund’s three-member board. It consists of Chris Jay Hoofnagle, who heads the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology; Tim Sparapani, Facebook’s public policy director; and writer Larry Magid.

While some people are saying that the settlement is unfair in a few ways, Justin Brookman, a senior resident fellow at the Center for Democracy and Technology, seemed to disagree. The general contention has been that Facebook will have one seat on the three-member board for the “digital trust fund” and that it was already required to pay money out to promote online privacy, as our own Sarah Perez discussed when the settlement was first announced last October.

Brookman said that today’s decision is “a really good settlement for consumers”, explaining that “there are really very few settlements that come up with that type of monetary figure.”

He also contended that, while Facebook will have a seat on the board, it will be a minority member, as a majority vote requires two out of the three parties to agree. He said that the other two members, Hoofnagle and Magid, were both good choices who will act in the public’s interest.

“We have a lot of confidence they’ll make wise awards of the money,” he said. “They both criticized Facebook when Beacon came out.”

According to the Times, however, this may not be the end of the appeal process.

One privacy advocate said he was exploring whether he could appeal the decision. “This sweetheart deal for Facebook is outrageous and another indication they don’t really want to ensure privacy online,” said Jeffrey Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy.

Brookman noted, however, that a settlement like this for privacy issues was relatively unprecedented.

Discuss

The Web has hit a point where tracking pageviews is useless for startups.

There was a time when all you needed to succeed on the Internet were lots and lots of eyeballs, and the best way of measuring those eyeballs was by tracking pageviews (measuring exactly which pages on a website are viewed by individual visitors). The dot-com crash showed us that the eyeball-based business model was a failure.

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Since then, startups have moved toward direct monetization strategies such as subscriptions and virtual goods – and these businesses using these strategies require very different metrics than an advertising-based business would. Make no mistake, pageviews were valuable metric once, but their time has passed.

Guest author Tim Trefren is one of the founders of Mixpanel, a real-time Web analytics service that helps companies understand how users interact with Web applications. He writes about analytics at the company blog.

For startups that sell something, metrics like average revenue per user (ARPU) and customer lifetime value (CLV) are vastly more valuable than detailed pageview tracking. It doesn’t make any sense to focus on pageviews (an approximation for value) when you can measure the real thing directly.

There’s also a clear pattern in the direction the Web is heading – toward interaction and responsiveness, and away from separate pages. If you’re going for incredible user experience, on-page interactions are your bread and butter. Can you imagine what a drag it would be if the page reloaded every time you commented or ‘Liked’ something on Facebook? It would be awful.

This trend further devalues the pageview as a valid metric. If you have a highly interactive Web application that spans only a few pages, there’s not a whole lot of value in seeing how many times those pages were loaded. Much more valuable information can be found by tracking the parts of your application that your users are interacting with the most. The benefits here are twofold: You can directly measure the things that are important to you, and you gain unparalleled insight into how people actually use your application.

If Not Pageviews, Then What?

When you’re deciding how to incorporate analytics into your strategy, the most important thing is that you are gathering actionable data. By this I mean that you have to be able to use the information you gather to make a decision and take action. If you’re not going to use it to make a decision, it’s a waste of time to even look at it.

With this in mind, there are a few areas we should focus on: split testing, interaction tracking, conversion funnel analysis, and click tracking. These methods will give you the information you need to both improve your conversion rates and your understanding of user behavior.

Just a few years back, your only options were to roll your own analytics or to pay tons of money to a giant company like Omniture. This left startups in a tough spot, one many startup founders still encounter today: it’s difficult to justify putting a lot of development time into analytics when it’s not your main product, and it’s hard for a small company to work with a large sales organization.

Luckily, the analytics landscape is changing. Many new companies are sprouting up to handle every aspect of your analytics, freeing you from the need to develop your own internal tools.

Split testing

Split testing involves creating different versions of your site and measuring how the changes affect user behavior. Your changes can be as small as a different call to action or as large as a complete redesign. With this data in hand, you can make changes to your website to massively improve your conversion rates.

What companies do it?

• Google Website Optimizer is a free multivariate testing solution. It makes it possible to change a number of different things and determine the optimal combination of changes.

Conversion funnel analysis

Funnel analysis is a way of measuring conversion rates across multiple steps of user acquisition. For example, you can measure the rate at which visitors from the front page go to the pricing page, and then how many continue on to actually create an account. This is an incredibly important concept to understand, and can be applied to many aspects of your application.

What companies do it?

• Mixpanel (my company) is a freemium service that provides funnel analysis and segmentation.
• Google Analytics has a feature called Funnel Visualization that provides basic pageview-based funnel tracking.
• KISSmetrics is a new company with a funnel analysis product in closed beta.

Click tracking

Click tracking is a great way to measure how effective your website is. Every click a visitor makes is recorded, so you know which links and buttons are receiving attention. There are a number of ways to report this data, but the most popular is to overlay an image of your website with a heatmap of all of the clicks. If your users aren’t performing as you expect, you can try changing the page and continuing the test.

What products do it?

• ClickTale is a freemium service that can generate click heatmaps and movies of single visitor sessions.
• CrazyEgg is a paid service that can generate a few different reports for your visitor click activity, including heatmaps.

Event tracking

Event tracking is a way of measuring exactly what users are doing on your site. Things like invites sent, videos played, and user signups all count as events. This functionality will grow more and more important as the Web grows more interactive.

What companies do it?

• Kontagent is a freemium service that is focused on Facebook applications. It can track Facebook-specific events like invites and notifications, among other things.
• Google Analytics recently added basic event tracking to complement its pageview based service.

Measure Relevancy, Not Your Ego

Ultimately, analytics are crucial to online success. If you want to improve your startup, you’ve got to be measuring it. It’s critical to measure the right things, though – the things that are actually important to your business, not things merely appeal to your ego. It can be mesmerizing to watch the unique visitor count go up day-over-day, but this is a dangerous diversion. The era of eyeballs equaling success is long past, so you should instead be measuring the things that are truly relevant to your business.

If you’re not measuring your visitors yet, I urge you to get your toes wet – track something small. The conversion rates for the buttons on your front page would be a great place to start.

Is the pageview really dead? What other companies and services are available to help companies move beyond a pageview-centric mindset? Let us know in the comments

Photo by Iva Villi.

Discuss

Fair, thorough, enterprising and in context – that’s what we’re looking for in the journalism we read, isn’t it? At a time when shallow ranting takes up so much space in public discourse, a new media evaluation technology offers hope, inspiration and is a lot of fun to use.

NewsTrust is a media technology organization funded by the Omidyar Network and MacAurthur Foundation. Yesterday it launched a personalized news filtering tool called MyNews. The tool helps users review the quality of journalism from all over the web and discover high-quality content they and their friends might enjoy. A light-weight, crowd-sourced, personalized recommendation engine that adds value on top of existing content? Sounds like our kind of app!

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When reading content from around the web through NewsTrust, the user is presented with a well-designed interface through which to review the quality of journalism in question. Users are prompted to evaluate stories based on things like how well they were sourced, whether both sides of a controversy were explained and how enterprising the story was. Short and long reviews are supported and it’s easy to review a story in less than 30 seconds if you feel so inclined.

The ability to post links to Twitter and Facebook with a single click means that users who already share articles around social networks have an opportunity to pause briefly and add another layer of value by using NewsTrust.

The new MyNews product released yesterday leverages that network of reviewers to draw in a stream of high-quality links from around the web, on particular topics. In addition to NewsTrust reviewers, the service also delivers stories discovered and vetted algorithmically and it pulls links shared by your friends on Facebook and Twitter into the NewsTrust ecosystem. It’s one thing to get a vote of apparent approval from friends sharing links on social networks, it’s another to peruse those links through a lens of community grading for journalistic quality.

The end result is a personalized news reader populated with generally high-quality topical stories that have been reviewed by other readers. It’s a useful product and one that would work well as a mobile app, where browsing through lots of content of variable quality is less appealing.

NewsTrust and MyNews aren’t for everyone, though. Only so many people will be interested in a news consumption interface so closely wedded to review activities. Many people will, no doubt, bristle at the prospect (or reality) of amateurs reviewing the quality of professional journalistic product. Some will find the site too left-leaning for their tastes. (Though it tries hard not to be.)

Many people will enjoy MyNews, though, and we suspect everyone who follows social software in general will find this project particularly interesting. Projects like this may or may not be able to change the way news producers operate, but the news consumers who use it will likely find MyNews a helpful way to enrich their time on an otherwise all-too often low-quality web of news content.

Discuss

The US Department of Justice this week released slides from a presentation deck titled Obtaining and Using Evidence from Social Networking Sites. The document was released in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

The DoJ presentation describes Facebook as much more co-operative with law enforcement requests for user information than Twitter and MySpace are. It also explains to officers what the advantages of going undercover on social networking sites are. The EFF posted IRS training documents for using various internet tools as well, including Google Street View, but those were much tamer than the Justice file.

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Highlights from the deck include:

• On “getting info from Facebook” – options include photos, contact info, group contact info and IP logs. “HOWEVER, Facebook has other data available.” The deck notes that Facebook is “often cooperative with emergency requests.”
• MySpace and Twitter, on the other hand, are described differently. MySpace “requires a search warrant for private messages/bulletins less than 181 days old.” Twitter “will not preserve data without legal process,” has a “stated policy of producing data only in response to legal process” and has no Law Enforcement Guide (or spying manual, as some parties call such documents). Wouldn’t you like your social network to say no before it says yes and require a warrant before handing over information to law enforcement? We reached out to Facebook this evening about the government claim that it was unusually co-operative but have not yet received a response.
• Funny: As social networks go, LinkedIn’s “use for criminal communications appears limited” the document says. You don’t say.
• “Why go undercover on Facebook, MySpace, etc?” the document asks. Three reasons are offered: 1. Communicate with suspects/targets. 2. Gain access to non-public info. 3. Map social relationships/networks.
• “If agents violate terms of service,” the document asks, “is that ‘otherwise illegal activity’?” No answer is offered in the text.
• “Many witnesses have social-networking pages,” the presentation notes. Those pages can be a “Valuable source of info on defense witnesses” and “Potential pitfalls for government witnesses.”
• Also funny: DoJ prosectors are urged to “Use caution in ‘friending’ judges, defense counsel.”

We expect the Electronic Frontier Foundation to offer further analysis in coming days. You can download a PDF of the document yourself here.

Discuss

Lady Gaga, along with her record company, is evolving the album in the form of software as a service. Considering the content of her hit new video, Telephone, it is fitting that she would use software to tackle the hard problem of getting paid by amazing fans.

On her path to global dominance, the site, LadyGaga.com has innovated the next generation of brand management for artists. To do this, she creates a join between Google’s YouTube, Apple’s iTunes, Twitter, and Facebook. Way beyond having a an Twitter account, LadyGaga is hosting an interface party, and you’re invited. She’s a performer who is inventing ways to create the value of using multiple platforms to juice the network effects.

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Like it a lot? Take a souvenir home from the party for the low introductory price of $1.99 in your iTunes.

Today, we noticed another cultural icon, VC Fred Wilson posted this question on his blog as to what will emerge as Commerce 2.0.

“So the question is who will the YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter of commerce be? Maybe they exist today and will emerge as large scale web services soon. Or maybe they are still ideas in the minds of entrepreneurs and will be hatched in the coming years.

It’s an area I am excited about and will be on the lookout for. Clearly I’m not the only one.”

This is where we think LadyGaga.com’s promotion for Telephone stands out as an example of the new world economy. This world is connected by the best ad engines of Google. And it is directly connected to Apple’s amazing commerce engine. Apple, in the context of digital goods is showing how extremely it is positioned to be the payment engine.

Embedding YouTube: Get it Now, Anywhere

We witnessed YouTube transition from the wild-west to a control point for labels. Now, a lot of the newest official artist videos flow straight to Vevo, the branded label friendly site that runs ads and controls the experience of the brand.

YouTube is taking advantage of its place as a channeling service for video. In this case, the top, most requested inventory pays for the rest of the service. The higher the demand, the more attention it gets.

LadyGaga.com, like many sites, uses embeddable YouTube. In addition to pointing to commerce services, it embeds links back into other properties at Vevo. Being embeddedable, provides entire custom experience including artist promotion to the site.

iTunes is prominently offered for both buying the video (which is also free on the same page) and also the album. So, there is a bet here that people want to own it, or place value in their iTunes library to offer this connected service.

This brings the user to a one-moment to buy scenario. Shown here, there is the familiar transition to iTunes from the LadyGaga site.

And, the authorization to ‘Buy Now’.

In default mode, iTunes is set to require a validation step (a second click) to buy the media. The user can can be set easily to bypass this step and enable the user one-click to buy from the web in the future.

This feature is available to any Apple affiliate, but we find it particularly effective coming from the artist embedded with the video and other endorsements.

Tweeting, End to End, Facebook, FTW

We noticed that with a simple interaction, we can logon to Facebook and Twitter from LadyGaga.com and drop a status post, or “tweet” into Facebook or Twitter. Incredibly, inside iTunes, both services are available as well. The real story is that social networks, and commerce networks work together, end-to-end, and, for-the-win.

In a twist of fate, in this version of digital music future the record labels win big. They do it by being close to both eyeballs (Google) and library (Apple), and bringing out the thing they know, the pop.

LadyGaga is on a roll

With the help of Twitter, Facebook, Google, and Apple she will connect to more platforms than ever before, with fewer clicks and passwords.

We wonder how this evolve further into other platforms. Will LadyGaga’s services continue to find new ways to leverage real-time services? We’re starting to envision personal mobile and location aware fan applications.

Will the forces of cloud computing and commerce force Apple and Google be best-friends-forever in music?

And, will we ever build a phone that doesn’t disrupt us while on the dance floor?

And, for god’s sake, damn, Beyonce’ has her back.

Discuss

Earlier tonight, the Paley Center hosted a discussion about social media and digital activism with celebrated artist, architectural designer, activist and blogger Ai Weiwei, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and ReadWriteWeb’s editor and founder Richard MacManus. The discussion touched upon a large variety of topics related to social media and digital activism in China, including translating Twitter into Chinese and Google’s exit from the Chinese market.

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Jack Dorsey joined the conversation via satellite from San Francisco. The conversation was moderated by Emily Parker, the Arthur Ross Fellow at the Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations, who is currently working on a book about China and the Internet.

To start out the discussion, MacManus pointed out that it was the read/write aspect of the Internet that spawned the growth of social networks like Facebook and Twitter over the last few years. In the Western world, this development allowed users to connect and express their thoughts freely. In China, however, even though the same tools are available as in the West, a lot of them are currently blocked and censored. In addition to this, Ai Weiwei noted that sites like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, as well as TV channels like CNN, are currently blocked in China.

Even though there are a number of Facebook and Twitter clones in China, Ai Weiwei argued that those companies work within the framework that the Chinese government has set for them with regards to what users can say on these services. Ai Weiwei’s name, for example, can never be used on these sites without getting censored. Indeed, said Ai Weiwei, using Twitter in China is “very physical and dangerous.”

Translating Twitter

Asked about the reason for Twitter’s popularity among netizens, Ai Weiwei noted that services like Twitter and blogs are easy to use, but once he got too popular, his blog was quickly shut down. Even though Twitter has a 140-character limit, Twitter’s users in China can easily express in-depth thoughts because the Chinese language allows Twitter users to express 140 words on Twitter and not just 140 characters.

With regards to how Twitter is being used in China, Ai Weiwei noted that the most active Twitter users in China often use the service for political and philosophical discussions.

Jack Dorsey, after recapping the basic history of Twitter and his fascination with maps, and open, public databases, noted that messages on Twitter, even though they are often trivial, do show that “we are human” and remind us that we are all the same. Twitter, which he called a utility, was extended by the user and the developer ecosystem that grew up around it. Internet users across the world can now use it to communicate, talk to their governments, build a business and create political movements.

Ai Weiwei told Dorsey that the “Chinese people think you are some kind of God” because Twitter allows people to express themselves without worrying about censorship.

A lot of the discussion with Jack Dorsey focused on had to do with what Twitter can do to to help its users in China. Ai Weiwei directly asked Dorsey why Twitter doesn’t provide its users a Chinese-language version of Twitter. According to Dorsey, it is just a question of time and mostly a technological issue. Given Twitter’s problems with scaling the service, making it work for every character set creates some issues for Twitter because of the legacy framework that Twitter established in its early days. Currently, the company doesn’t really have the resources to devote to this. Doresey did, however, argue that users already know how the service is meant to work and understand the setup of the Twitter page.

Dorsey also noted that Twitter isn’t sure that it really wants to move into the Chinese market, but would like to offer a Chinese translation of its service at some point. Indeed, Dorsey noted that he wasn’t even aware that Twitter was blocked in China until just a few weeks ago.

Censorship and Twitter

MacManus then asked Ai Weiwei if the Chinese government couldn’t just censor Twitter or force Twitter to censor its service. Ai Weiwei, however, pointed out that Twitter could easily translate Twitter’s registration page to help Chinese users. He noted that he isn’t asking Twitter to set up an operation in China – he just wants Twitter to make the service easier to use for Chinese users and to translate large parts of the service. The Internet companies in China, as MacManus noted, tend to “self-discipline” themselves and censor their own content. MacManus wondered what would happen to a Chinese language version of Twitter, and if it wouldn’t just get blocked and censored just like other international services.

Ai Weiwei noted that a lot of international companies that would like to enter the Chinese market have a responsibility to not give up on basic human rights. While the discussion didn’t go into depth with regards to the issues surrounding Google’s exit from China, MacManus noted that Google was one of the few Western services that entered the Chinese market, even though it faced a strong Chinese competitor. According to MacManus, leaving the Chinese market was a “brave move” by Google that sends a strong message that these companies are willing to stand up to the Chinese government.

Twitter’s Moral Responsibility

Twitter and other technology companies have, said Dorsey, a responsibility to follow basic moral guidelines, and in his view, many technology companies have helped to push the messages of the U.S. government (and other governments) forward with regards to acknowledging human rights violations in China.

Asked specifically if companies do have a moral responsibility, Dorsey said that Twitter – as a company – is focused on opening information as completely as possible and wants to ensure that everybody can participate in the conversations on the service. Twitter, which according to Dorsey was founded around the principles of immediacy and transparency, allows users to create a shared experience among users around the world and create more empathy.

Towards the end of the discussion, Dorsey said that Twitter is just a tool and that it can’t change any governments itself, but that it is the users who can use it to change governments.

As MacManus noted during the discussion, it is people like Ai Weiwei that are using these tools effectively. One day, Ai Weiwei noted towards the end of the discussion, we won’t need tools like Twitter to change our governments anymore.

Discuss

When hundreds of clueless commenters decided mid-February that ReadWriteWeb was the place to log in to Facebook, alerts went off in my personal network like alarms at a fire station. For the past few years I’ve been doing research on misunderstandings online; since it’s the subject of my doctoral thesis, all my friends know I eat, sleep, and breathe this topic, and was likely to be so buried in it that I’d miss new developments.

It’s a good thing they woke me from doctoral sluggishness; with thousands of comments, this is the biggest such thread I’ve seen. The ReadWriteWeb/Facebook thread looks a lot like previous threads, but it has some interesting new developments.

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Guest author Gillian Andrews is finishing her dissertation at Columbia University. She collects other examples of misunderstandings on Gumbaby.com. She channels her Internet literacy energies into the hacker radio show Off The Hook and producing The Media Show on YouTube, an irreverent, puppet-fueled stab at mass education.

As ReadWriteWeb readers have learned, misunderstandings like these never fail to entertain and astound. They’ve been a repeat topic of interest on community blogs; MetaFilter, for example, has scratched its collective head about this many a time. Accusations always fly: these “strangers” (as I’ve come to call them) are idiots, illiterates, came from AOL, shouldn’t be allowed out on the Internet without someone to hold their hand. Less often, a few voices speak up from the development community and say, Wait a minute, we build the software the Internet runs on – isn’t this partly our fault?

The ReadWriteWeb thread lays the blame to some extent on search engines, as ReadWriteWeb writer Mike Melanson has already written. But it also points to the rise of social networking services as a culprit.

Social Networking Software Changed the Landscape

Examples of misunderstandings abound in listservs, blog comment threads, newspaper article comment sections and even Wikipedia. Blogs where people ask to get an account canceled are pretty common. The login fiasco on this website is the first time I’ve seen a firestorm of misunderstanding sparked specifically by people trying to log on to an unrelated website.

But then, the ability to log into a service from an unrelated website is only a few years old. Is it any surprise that people are thrown by it? These commenters arrived from a search engine, looking for Facebook. At the bottom of the page where they landed, ReadWriteWeb offered them the opportunity to “Sign in with Facebook.” They did – many comments link directly to a Facebook profile. What happened when they signed in? They were dropped right back on the ReadWriteWeb page where they started, with no indication of what had happened save for the line “Thanks for signing in, X. Now you can comment.”

Text Boxes: They’re Confusing

When commenters signed in to Facebook on ReadWriteWeb, it rewarded them with a text box labeled “Comments (You may use HTML tags for style).” Where do these comments go? It doesn’t say. It’s down at the bottom of a huge window, which means when you’re looking at it, you can’t see most of the page’s identifying information at the top of the page. (Except for the URL, but I’ll get to that in a minute.) Many text boxes around the Web are woefully under-labeled.

When I was beginning my research, a guy who worked at Blogger said to me, “People will put just anything in a text box,” and it seems to be true. Evidence abounds that people interpret comment boxes in any number of ways. Some think they are sending private email. Some think they’re sending a chat message, and get belligerent when nobody responds right away. A few seem to think it’s a word processor, and “Submit” means the same thing as “save.”

A comment which really blew my mind was posted to a blog by a woman who appeared to confuse comments on a blog with “online prayer” – an Internet activity which is probably unfamiliar to most denizens of high-tech blogs. Google it, though, and you’ll find numerous pages, with Pat Robertson’s organization ranking among the top ones.

Online prayer sites provide a form that lets you include your name, contact information, and a comment about what prayers you need – a form which looks startlingly like a blog comment form. The idea is that your message will be sent to Robertson or other church staff, and they will pray for you. Sometimes the form includes a promise that your message will be kept confidential; other times, there is no such promise, but it seems to matter little to those who don’t understand where a comment form goes anyway.

Online prayer may be new to you. Logging in to Facebook through another site is new to most of us. It’s worth keeping in mind that the vast majority of people alive today were never taught to read a webpage in school, the way they were taught to read the title, author information and pages of a book. This brings us to another theme in the ReadWriteWeb thread which is repeated across most other misunderstandings of this type.

Literacy is Not the Problem – New Kinds of Literacy Are

ReadWriteWeb readers and other “natives” call errant commenters any number of nasty names (and use an upsetting amount of eugenic language, suggesting these “idiot” commenters should be “weeded out of the gene pool.”) One favorite insult is “illiterate.”

As stated, this is a little unfair when most of these people never had a chance to learn Internet skills in school, where skills might be broken down into simple elements that most of us don’t even remember learning. (When you learn to read a book, for example, you learn which way to hold the book, how to turn pages, reading left to right, chunking letters into phonemes and words into sentences.)

But beyond being unfair, it’s not wholly correct to call them illiterate. They do read and write. They just don’t always do so in ways that are considered appropriate by the technologically skilled (and the code they write).

Literacy has never been a single monolithic skill. It involves both reading and writing, and these two skills are independent of each other. More to the point, literacy involves reading and writing differently in a range of situations. You may consider yourself literate because you have read Shakespeare, or because you can write a coherent quarterly report. But you don’t write your quarterly report as a sonnet. Different forms of literacy apply at different times, and people can be good at some kinds of literacy while needing assistance in others.

Basic decoding (reading) and writing are rarely the problem in these misunderstandings. While many comments left by strangers on the threads I have studied are misspelled, use bad grammar, or are written in all-caps (or, even more confusingly, All Initial Caps), plenty can’t be distinguished from the comments left by tech-savvy commenters when it comes to writing skill.

In fact, “strangers” are more likely than natives to write their comments in ways we all learned in school. In most of the threads I have studied, they make it clear who they are addressing (“Dear Facebook,”) who is writing (“Thanks, Linda”) and even how to understand where they are coming from geographically. They do this to the point of redundancy, sometimes entering this information into more than one comment field.

One stranger, trying to reach Maury Povich on a classic thread dug up by MetaFilter, writes a spellchecked-perfect traditional letter, right down to the formatting of the date and greetings. (When was the last time you spellchecked a hastily written comment?) Other errant commenters are published authors, or even have advanced degrees. Again, their problem is not traditional literacy; the problem is that the Internet demands new kinds of literacy, and they haven’t had the training yet. Mocking them in a comment thread doesn’t improve their skills.

Reading-wise, there are plenty of indications in my data that strangers have read other parts of the page. There seems to be a general trend that they are less likely to directly address a celebrity (for example) when the comments right above their own come from natives who say “ommfg, this is not Maury Povich’s website!” My favorite example of a stranger demonstrating her reading skills is a commenter on a thread where a blogger wrote about his joy at learning that all kinds of things – M&Ms, ketchup bottles, soda, etc – could now be customized. The blogger titled his post “Ketchup of the People.” The commenter wrote:

I found the order for custom printed m & m’s in the coupon section of the providence journal sunday paper. It said nothing about ordering ketchup first or anything about the blog. All I wanted was to surprise my 80 year old aunt who loves m & m’s with this special custom order. What is this a scam or something? If it is, it’s pretty cruel? Please respond.

Through some referral-log forensics, the blogger and his readers determined that this commenter had, in fact, entered the URL provided by her newspaper. The problem was, the offer had expired, and the only remaining reference to this URL was on the blogger’s page, where she landed. So she set about trying to make sense of what she found in the best way she could. Would she have to order ketchup first? Was the blog somehow a gatekeeper to the order? This all sounded fishy – was it a scam?

Presented with apparent nonsense, all of us do our best to make sense of it; that’s just what the human brain does. On the Web, people don’t always have the information they need to understand what’s going on.

Next page: What is a URL?

Although the "thud" wasn’t verified until this afternoon, it seems that an online giant fell a couple of days ago.  According to new data from Hitwise, Facebook managed to beat Google in terms of visits between March 7th and March 13th, becoming the most visited website in the U.S. for the week.

The graph visible below makes the changeup pretty clear (blame the sloppy enlarged bit on us, not Hitwise).  What’s more, it doesn’t look like Facebook’s going to relinquish its lead anytime soon.

Heather Dougherty explained, "The market share of visits to Facebook.com increased 185% last week as compared to the same week in 2009, while visits to Google.com increased 9% during the same time frame."

Then here’s one more interesting fact, courtesy of Dougherty: "Together Facebook.com and Google.com accounted for 14% of all US Internet visits last week."

Anyway, this development represents a major win for Facebook.  The ability to represent the social network as the number one site should count for a lot as corporate representatives talk to advertisers and investors, and could result in a direct boost in revenue.  A further snowball effect in terms of user interest might occur, too, since most people like to be part of something that’s popular.

It has been quite busy this week on the Web as loads of announcements leading up to SXSW have hit the newswires. This weekend’s festivities in Austin look to top last year’s Twitter invasion with a location-based show down between Foursquare and Gowalla. It was a busy week at ReadWriteStart as well, so here’s a run down of the top stories in this edition of the Weekly Wrapup. This week we’ve got tips for not killing your startup, how little changes can make big impacts, the truth about VPs of sales and marketing, an early look at some data from TechStars, and an entrepreneur’s take on coworking facilities.

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10 Principles For Not Killing Your Startup

Everywhere you look these days, people are attempting to start innovative businesses and nonprofits, working on putting team, product and financing together, and generally trying to change the world – or, at least, their world – through entrepreneurship.

Meanwhile, I strongly suspect that the mortality rate of tech startups is as high as ever (no rigorous scientific tracking there, just common sense and observation – please do share stats if you know of some). In any case, one failed startup is one too many.

All the Small Things: Facebook Demonstrates How to Get Big Results From Little Changes

We’ve talked about design a lot recently, highlighting the nuances of thoughtful placement and treatment of various elements of a web page. Today I stumbled onto an interesting blog post by Ryan Spoon of Polaris Venture Partners about how small changes or additions, specifically in design, can at times make a huge difference for a product on the Web. In the example Spoon references, Facebook added a post log-out message to their homepage which for some users will suggest they look into using Facebook mobile – a small change that is proving useful for the social media powerhouse.

There is No Perfect VP of Sales and Marketing

Sales and marketing are not the same thing. It’s true they both deal with relationship management and it’s true that neither of these job descriptions require hardcore engineering, but just because they’re both in the realm of words over code does not mean that they are the same. At the risk of muddling your mind with HR jargon, the core competencies of a marketer are very different from those of a sales person. Surprisingly, many startup CEOs insist on hiring for a VP of Sales and Marketing position.

First Look at TechStars Historical Results Data

TechStars is an early stage venture fund based in Boulder, Colorado. ReadWriteWeb was given an early peek at historical results data on TechStars companies, which the organization is about to release. The data shows acquisition and failure rates, as well as how many of the TechStar companies have gone on to receive angel or venture funding.

TechStars reports that nearly 6 of 10 of their companies have historically gone on to receive outside angel or venture funding (not including friends or family). Five other companies reported that they are now profitable without outside funding, so overall 27 of 39 (69.23%) TechStars companies have either raised outside funding after the program or bootstrapped to profitability.

An Entrepreneur’s View On The Benefits of Coworking

We’ve all heard of the big company that started as two guys in their garage, but these days, with startup organizations and incubators, more and more success stories seem to feature companies that built their success from group collaboration. One excellent example of how startups can take advantage of collaboration is to work in a coworking environment with other companies and entrepreneurs.

Discuss