Twitter Becoming a Niche Media?

Some believe Twitter will increasingly be a one-to-a-few medium, with a small base of hard-core users, increasingly selective about the contents they broadcast and who they follow. To be sure, power Twitter users are few. About five percent of the users account for 75 percent of the page views.

As an example, a recent Pew Research study indicates that 85 percent of USA Today.com users visit the site less than three times a month. And for the top 25 American news sites, “power users” who visit a site more than 10 times a month, account for seven percent of total visits.

That has some observers questioning Twitters’s limitations as a channel to drive consumption of online news. According the Pew Research Center for Excellence in Journalism, Twitter is an insignificant referral (one percent) source for news when compared to Facebook (five percent) or Google (30 percent).

Trifling Twitter | Monday Note

YouTube Reaches 3 Billion Daily Views

More than 48 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute, the company says. This constitutes a 37 percent increase over the last six months, and 100 percent over the last year.

YouTube also has surpassed the three billion views-per-day mark. This is a 50 percent increase over views last year.

YouTube Celebrates 6th Birthday With 3 Billion Views Per Day

Apple has Serious Brand Equity

Researcher Eric Fisher analyzed millions of Flickr photos and recorded where each was taken by using associated geotags. He determined that the four most popular places to snap photos in Manhattan: Times Square (4), Columbus Circle (3), Rockefeller Center, (2) and the 5th Avenue Apple Store (1).

That is some serious brand equity.

More People Take Photos Of The NYC Apple Store Than Of Times Square

'Please ReTweet' Generates 4x More ReTweets

Dan Zarella, writing at HubSpot, suggests that asking followers to "re-tweet" actually results in much-higher re-tweet rates. After analyzing more than 10,000 tweets and found that 51 percent of tweets that included 'Please ReTweet' were retweeted more than once, 39 percent of those including 'Please RT' were re-tweeted more than once, and only 12 percent of tweets that included neither were retweeted more than once.

New Data Proves 'Please ReTweet' Generates 4x More ReTweets

QoS is Next Frontier for Broadband, Ovum Says

Asus Launches Padfone

Asus is the latest firm to market a converged smartphone-plus-dock approach to smart phones. The Padfonecombines a smartphone and a tablet computer into one symbiotic gadget that allows users to choose the screen size that best fits their activities while sharing data and 3G Internet access.

The Padfone features a way to dock the smart phone inside the tablet to give users an expanded view. With the phone docked, it can recharge from the tablet’s larger battery and the tablet can also make use of the smartphone’s 3G Internet connection.

The dual interfaces for both the pad and phone ensure the layout is automatically adjusted for all activities such as video conferencing, web browsing and emailing.

Asus Launches Padfone, Notebooks, Netbooks

When Do "Features" Become "Attributes"?

Nobody thinks of a "battery" as a feature of a mobile device, unless the battery offers unusual performance. On the other hand, few really consider short battery life when using Internet features a key "bug," either. People just learn that their batteries won't last very long when they are using the Internet on their mobiles. That's a bit like the ability to make and receive phone calls. It isn't a feature, just an expected capability or attribute of a mobile phone.

But some features do, over time, become mere attributes. That might be happening to Research in Motion, which once dominated the "email-optimized smart phone market. It isn't so clear that the ability to use email on a smart phone any longer is a clear feature, as opposed to an attribute or expected capability.

The point is that when features become mere capabilities, the ability to build a whole market segment based on that feature also goes away. That might be one key reason for RIM's faltering market share.

So now Blackberry’s most significant feature – email – is no longer very interesting.

RIM, Caught Between Work And Whimsy, Has Lost Its Way