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