Google Trend in a comparison between Orkut and Facebook shows that Facebook has a leading edge when it comes to Social Networking Sites in India.

comScore, a Palo Alto based company, on their press release say:

Facebook.com posted, an especially strong month in July, growing 12 percent versus June, to capture the top spot in the category with 20.9 million visitors. Orkut ranked second with 19.9 million visitors (up 16 percent vs. year ago), followed by BharatStudent.com with 4.4 million visitors (up 3 percent). Twitter.com had the highest rate of growth among the top five social networking sites, increasing 239 percent to 3.3 million visitors. Yahoo! owned two of the top ten social networking sites: Yahoo! Pulse (3.5 million visitors) and Yahoo! Buzz (1.8 million visitors).

Though Twitter has the highest growth rate i.e. 239% but it’s still far behind from Facebook and Orkut. If these statistics are to be believed then Twitter will become Number 1 Social Networking Site in India much sooner than expected.

Few small business owners and managers are joining the consumer trend towards increasingly using social networking websites and services, according to a new Citibank / GfK Roper survey.

According to the survey of 500 small business executives, 76 percent have not found social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to be helpful in generating business leads or for expanding their business during the last year, while 86 percent say they have not used social networking sites to get business advice or information.

The survey found that general search engine sites such as Google and Yahoo! trump small business-focused sites and the WSJ.com as destinations for small business owners to seek business advice or information. 61 percent of respondents say they rely on these search engine sites.

“Our survey suggests that small business owners are still feeling their way into social media, particularly when it comes to using these tools to grow their businesses,” said Maria Veltre, Executive Vice President of Citi’s Small Business Segment. “While social media can provide additional channels to network and help grow a business, many small businesses may not have the manpower or the time required take advantage of them.”

Forty-two percent of small business owners and managers reported that in the past year they have made greater use of their company’s website to generate business leads and sales. Among companies with 20 to 99 employees the percentage rises with 57 percent saying they have made greater use of their website. Survey respondents are also using email marketing (28 percent) and online advertising (25 percent) to generate business leads and sales.

Source: Citibank

From the time, Google has launched real-time search feature that integrates live updates from blogs, news sites, Twitter, Facebook, many people had started thinking that integrating their Twitter feeds into their sites / blogs will increase their PageRank and will show them on page 1.

Well, that’s nice perception but answer to above question is “No“. Coz PageRank involves multiple factors, and one of them is backlinks. Since Twitter has added “nofollow” attribute to avoid spam, adding Twitter feed to your website/blog will not help increase your pagerank.

Many people also argue that Google always stress more on the content. Agreed, though Google mostly stress on content but on “Original” content and not on the “Duplicate“. Twitter feeds are more like duplicating your own content, so will not get you to Page 1 of Google.

Answer is Yes.

Twitter’s user base has continued to grow steadily with over 300,000 people signing up everyday. Keeping pace with these users and their activities definitely comes with complex engineering challenges. Twitter on their engineering blog said:

“We frequently compare the tasks of scaling, maintaining, and tweaking Twitter to building a rocket in mid-flight.”

It further says: We have made some improvements and optimizations as:

• Doubling the capacity of our internal network;
• Improving the monitoring of our internal network;
• Rebalancing the traffic on our internal network to redistribute the load;
• Doubling the throughput to the database that stores tweets;
• Making a number of improvements to the way we use memcache, improving the speed of Twitter while reducing internal network traffic; and,
• Improving page caching of the front and profile pages, reducing page load time by 80 percent for some of our most popular pages.

Everybody has witnessed how Twitter had Storm of Whales during the World Cup. Untill now, Twitter was using data centers built by NTT America in the Salt Lake City Area but this is not sufficient when you see 300,000 people signing up everyday. So, Twitter has decided to build it’s own Data Center. John Adams, lead engineer for application services says:

• Having dedicated data centers will give us more capacity to accommodate this growth in users and activity on Twitter.
• Second, Twitter will have full control over network and systems configuration, with a much larger footprint in a building designed specifically around our unique power and cooling needs. Twitter will be able to define and manage to a finer grained SLA on the service as we are managing and monitoring at all layers.

We hope with this New Data Center, people see less of outage and more of twitter’s availability, making it more reliable and true to people’s expectations.

Early June, Twitter had announced that it will have it’s own URL shortener. It further says:

“If you want to share a link through Twitter, there currently isn’t a way to automatically shorten it and we want to fix this. It should be easy for people to share shortened links from the Tweet box on Twitter.com.

To meet both of these goals, we’re taking small steps to expand the link service currently available in Direct Messages to links shared through all Tweets. We’re testing this link service now with a few Twitter employee accounts.”

How the Link Service Works

All links included in Direct Message notification emails will pass through link service and are converted to a http://t.co link. Twitter’s link service at http://t.co is used to better protect users from malicious sites that engage in spreading malware, phishing attacks, and other harmful activity. A link converted by Twitter’s link service is checked against a list of potentially dangerous sites. When there’s a match, users can be warned before they continue.

It will look like this:

Interesting thing to note is, Twitter is going to use the stats, available via this link service, to build it’s own analytics system.

Cassandra, open source distributed database, which was originally open sourced by Facebook in 2008 and is now being developed by Apache.

Twitter has been using Cassandra for various things like @toptweets, local trends, and analytics. Even the operations and infrastructure teams uses cassandra for large-scale real time analytics for use both internally and externally. This means, we can expect launching of Twitter Analytics soon.

Twitter on their recent blog post said:

“For now, we’re not working on using Cassandra as a store for Tweets. This is a change in strategy. Instead we’re going to continue to maintain our existing Mysql-based storage. We believe that this isn’t the time to make large scale migration to a new technology.”

We think this change is mainly due to “Fail whales” which Twitter had in the last month. We hope this change should bring some stability & reduces the downtime.

Retweeting or as popularly known as RT, has been a great feature and source on Twitter for sharing information quickly without typing the whole tweet again. From the time this feature has come, it has evolve quite a few changes. Earlier, if you just put RT in front of any tweet, it would count as Retweet but lately Twitter has changed this. Now RT will be considered only if the other person have not altered or have added anything to your original tweet. e.g.

will not be counted as RT whereas below will.

Want to know more about RT? Click here or see the video below

Google upped the relevance factor of its search results with the launch of a new real-time feature that integrates live updates from blogs, news sites, Twitter, Facebook, and more.

Now, when you enter a search term like “Hotel Taj Mumbai” into Google, you’ll not only get results from across the web, you also get the option of checking out a real-time stream of what people are saying about the Hotel right that minute in the news and blog posts, or on popular social networking sites like Twitter and FriendFeed. Besides the obvious coolness factor, the new feature makes it possible to get news related to your search term almost the instant it happens instead of waiting hours or days for web sites to get indexed.

This is a pretty awesome way to find out about breaking news or what people are saying about the latest blockbuster film. Imagine hearing about a traffic jam on the bridge right from passengers who Tweet about being stuck in traffic, or getting the skinny on movie reviews as people talk about it on FriendFeed. It’s basically integrating what we like best about Twitter directly into Google. To turn it on for search results, just:

Click on “Latest results” or select “Latest” from the search options menu to view a full page of live tweets, blogs, news and other web content scrolling right on Google. You can also filter your results to see only “Updates” from micro-blogs like Twitter, FriendFeed, Jaiku and others. Latest results and the new search options are also designed for iPhone and Android devices when you need them on the go, be it a quick glance at changing information like ski conditions or opening night chatter about a new movie — right when you’re in line to buy tickets.

Google partnered with Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, MySpace, Jaiku, and Identi.ca to pull status updates into search results from all those services. Google says the new service will be available to everyone in the next few days, but check out the video above in the meantime to see for yourself what it does.

It’s really amazing to see live updates in search results, but there’s plenty of people that don’t give a hoot about what the folks on Twitter or Facebook are talking about. It will also be interesting to see how Google keeps the signal-to-noise ratio down when huge news breaks and people everywhere are blogging, posting, and sometimes unintentionally spreading false information.

Social Media is an umbrella that covers your various activities and integrates technology, social interactions, videos, pictures and words. Not all of the above mentioned needs to be shared in one spot, but a few examples of such places that utilize these functions are most likely places you are either using or have heard of, such as; Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, LinkedIn, Mixx, YouTube and countless others. Social Media is the new-aged Media. It has traveled past radio and television, to allow us to connect globally in an interactive way. The difference between Media and Social Media is that we can receive information (what ever form it is in) in real-time and be able to share it with others in a fast fashion. The most significant difference is the social aspect, we are able to be heard, to share our voice, opinions and in some ways become the reporter.

With Media, there is a disconnect, we are the audience and we tune in to what ever news or entertainment news organizations that we’d prefer, with Social Media, whatever Social Network we belong to, we can not only be fed all types of news, but we are connected with one another as a community, with “like” buttons, comment sections and tagging to what or whom we want. We are limitless and in this fast pace society we are enjoying the less time consuming approach to being in touch with our world.

Examples of social media software applications include:

Communication

• Blogs: Blogger, LiveJournal, Open Diary, TypePad, WordPress, Vox, ExpressionEngine, Xanga
• Micro-blogging: Twitter, Plurk, Tumblr, Jaiku, fmylife
• Social networking: Bebo, BigTent, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Orkut, Skyrock, Hi5, Ning, Elgg, Drupal
• Social network aggregation: NutshellMail, FriendFeed

Collaboration

• Wikis: Wikipedia, PBwiki, wetpaint
• Social bookmarking: Delicious, StumbleUpon, Google Reader, CiteULike
• Social news: Digg, Mixx, Reddit, NowPublic

Multimedia

• Photo sharing: Flickr, Zooomr, Photobucket, SmugMug, Picasa
• Video sharing: YouTube, Viddler, Vimeo, sevenload
• Livecasting: Ustream.tv, Justin.tv, Stickam, Skype
• Audio and Music Sharing: imeem, The Hype Machine, Last.fm, ccMixter

Entertainment

• Media & Entertainment Platforms: Cisco Eos
• Virtual worlds: Second Life, The Sims Online, Forterra
• Game sharing: Miniclip, Kongregate

Social Media is not a place to conquer but a place to be involved, to help shape the way we share and to be a member of a non-exclusive growing population.

According to a statement made today by Twitter’s co-founder Biz Stone, the company is interested in acquiring more companies to expand upon their current core set of features. At a news conference held in Tel Aviv, Stone was quoted as saying that acquisitions are “something we are definitely interested in. We made an acquisition last year that turned out to be an outstandingly good decision.”

The acquisition he’s referring to is Twitter’s purchase of Summize, a real-time search engine that has now become search.twitter.com. Since that original purchase in summer of 2008, Twitter has made no other moves or indications that they were interested in buying other companies, seemingly more focused on quashing bugs, acquiring funding and partnering with major search engines like Bing and Google. Meanwhile, the ecosystem of Twitter applications exploded, and now includes hundreds if not thousands of apps powered by or integrated with Twitter’s service. But which of these apps deserve to become an official company offering?

Apparently, there may be a few apps that have already caught Twitter’s interest. Stone told the crowd in Tel Aviv that “our attention is grabbed by some of these developers,” and the company plans to “take a hard look at them.”

What Companies are on Twitter’s Radar?

Which applications do you suppose have crossed Twitter’s radar? Some insight may be found on Twitter’s “goodies” page where the company lists a handful of apps, widgets, and website buttons which Twitter users can browse through and download. Here, desktop Twitter clients like Twhirl and TweetDeck are promoted alongside mobile applications like Twitterific and PocketTweets.

However, the complete app list seems a little out-of-date when compared with what today’s Twitterers are actually using, especially on the mobile front. According to a study from August of this year, iPhone apps like Tweetie and TwitterFon are just as popular as Twitterific – if not more so – as is the Blackberry app TwitterBerry. And the one-time popular Twitter app Twhirl, an Adobe AIR desktop client, has long since been overshadowed by the more robust TweetDeck and similar web counterparts.

Among those web counterparts are the new tools from Seesmic and Brizzly, both of which have been garnering attention as of late, especially when they each introduced support for Twitter’s new “lists” feature earlier this month.

But client applications are only a small slice of the entire Twitter app universe. There are also games, blog and email plugins, utilities, analytics and search tools, shopping services, URL shortners and so much more. Plus, there are sites that attempt to aggregate the chaos into some sort of meaningful structure, like the oneforty.com website, for example, often called Twitter’s unofficial “app store” by its fans.

While we could only guess at which applications Twitter would want to adopt as their “official” clients or services, a good guess may involve some of the media sharing tools that have been popularized by a number of Twitter users wanting to share photos and videos in addition to plain text. TwitPic comes to mind as one of the top photo-sharing clients and TwitVid or Tweetube may be considered for video shares. These sorts of acquisitions seem to fit better with Twitter’s goal of expanding upon the core functionality of Twitter. Where before, the company was content with its simple 140-character updates, recent changes, including the integration of the URL-shortening service bit.ly, Twitter lists, geolocation features and a new implementation of the “re-tweet” structure seem to hint at Twitter’s desire to add more layers of complexity to the once-basic service.

More Acquisitions Could be Too Much of a Good Thing

However, Twitter needs to be careful not to add too much. Up until now, the service has grown organically, with a lot of its features and conventions implemented by its own user and developer community outside of the official channels. Bog it down too much with extra add-ons and new behaviors, and Twitter may scare off potential new users who already often struggle with figuring out what to do with the service in its simple form. Plus, longtime Twitterers may also be put-off to see their favorite clients or services ignored in favor of whatever companies Twitter chooses to bless through an acquisition deal. And once acquired, competing companies could wither and fade away, unable to compete, eventually leading their developers to cut their losses and move on.

What Should Twitter Acquire?

Earlier this year, we listed ten companies that Twitter should acquire next. Not surprisingly, some of the companies or their features have already been implemented, including bit.ly’s URL shortening service and the geo-location feature we mentioned. Meanwhile, another app on the list, FriendFeed, has already been acquired by Facebook, leaving our original list much shorter and now in need of an update.

Given Twitter’s intentions to start a shopping spree sometime in the near future, we wonder what apps will make their list. We also wonder if more Twitter acquisitions will end up being a good thing for the company and the community as a whole, or if it will end up stifling competition in what is now a thriving ecosystem of innovation and development. We hope Twitter proceeds cautiously and wisely in this area – any major unwelcome changes have the ability to alienate the very community that made Twitter what it is today.