Twitter users are the most influential online consumers, according to a study by ExactTarget and CoTweet.

A study by twin solution providers equals a massive grain of salt taken, but the findings still warrant conversation.

Twitter users are 72 percent more likely than non-users to publish blog posts at least once a month, and 61 percent more likely to post product reviews at least once a month, according to the study. Daily Twitter users are 6 times more likely to publish articles, five times more likely to blog, seven more times likely to contribute to Wikis and three times more likely to post a monthly product review than non-Twitter users.

“Consumers active on Twitter are clearly the most influential online,” said Morgan Stewart, principal, ExactTarget’s research and education group.

“What happens on Twitter doesn’t stay on Twitter,” Morgan said. “While the number of active Twitter users is less than Facebook or email, the concentration of highly engaged and influential content creators is unrivaled—it’s become the gathering place for content creators whose influence spills over into every other corner of the internet.”

The study is sort of the Cartesian circle – Twitter users are more likely to be content producers, who are more likely to be Twitter users, ad infinitum. We still need to figure out how large a circle of influence the influencers have outside of their own circles.

While Twitter users might be more influential as individuals, the influence of Facebook as a megalithic whole is certainly greater, especially as it has become a more brand friendly place during its evolution, something that it wasn’t but Twitter was from its inception. That might be a little old-school in thinking, but Facebook has convinced the mainstream user – and consumer – of its relevance, something that Twitter is still trying to do.

So while Twitter might have the influencers, it’s still probably better to bet on the half billion users.

When you live in Silicon Valley, there is one thing that you forget after a while: users here are on the cutting edge of innovation.

Massive check-ins on Foursquare, Twitter updates, Yelp stickers on every restaurant door, geeky events that attract thousands of people . . . it’s a long list of signs showing how people here have jumped into innovation. As a result, living in Silicon Valley is at the same time enlightening and blinding.

Start-ups are proposing new services and products meant for improving other start-ups’ products. (See: the vast Twitter 3rd-party ecosystem.)

Because Internet evangelization doesn’t seemed to be the priority of start-ups – it’s not their job, true – the Silicon Valley ecosystem appears to be a huge innovation marketplace massively dedicated to hyping geeky users.

Yesterday’s Forrester study about location-based services shows that only 4 percent of online American adults have ever used a location-based app on their phone, and less than 1 percent are using them more than once per week. Within this 1 percent of users, 80 percent are male and 70 percent are aged 19-35.

More people are active on microblogging sites than using location-based apps: one-fifth of U.S. Internet users are now on Twitter. They are mostly between 18 and 44 years old, are already using social networks (Facebook, MySpace). As for all social media, a very small number of users is creating the content for the vast majority of the others (10% of users are tweeting for the 90% others).

If there is one thing that marketers and entrepreneurs should never forget, it’s to always weigh the very large majority of Internet users that are staying at a simple level of utilization. Facebook is the first social media tool to be used so massively and it doesn’t mean that everybody is ready to plunge into the web tornado.

How to share information in the most efficient way? This is one of businesses’ main computing needs. Designers are trying to solve this problem by optimizing information visualization. Online data lets digital artists and communication professionals imagine the information of tomorrow.

The challenge for information visualization designers is to keep simplicity and efficiency while retaining data complexity. The New York Times succeeded doing it with its Visualization Lab. The online newspaper lets readers create their own graphics from various data sets. The Times Application for iPad lets readers understand news in a totally creative and impressive way.

B2B companies are proposing tools and services to make information visualization more efficient in a business context. Prezi (an astonishing service that let businesses create innovative presentations), and also Lovely Charts and Exploratree are all about creating graphics that rock.

Twitter seems to be the most inspiring social media service for creative designers. Real-time data, short messages, social: Twitter is the jack of all visualization trades! From the famous and beautiful We Feel Fine, created by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar, which shows the feelings of Twitter users in real-time, to Trendsmap, a geo-located map of Twitter trends, or Twitterverse, which matches location data and new Twitter messages. Great information cartography that inspires business! We also invite you to have a look at Zappos information visualization or Uniqlo for more great examples.

In technology as in culture, when the traditional players take a page from the innovators’ playbook, one of two things generally happens.

The traditional player’s adoption of innovation can be so successful that it co-opts or even bests the innovators (remember back when Google’s acquisition of Twitter was inevitable? Remember Google Buzz?).

Or the opposite can happen, and traditional actors become plot points on the way to the paradigm shift (see: AOL, MySpace).

We don’t know if either of these scenarios will play out with Visa’s entry into PayPal’s space with Rightcliq, but PayPal, debit cards, waning customer confidence, micropayments, new legislation and even Gen Y are certainly chipping away at the credit card industry.

Visa’s Rightcliq “is an online shopping tool targeted to consumers that assists online shoppers by offering the ability to browse multiple merchants and select items consumers are interested in looking at in one central location, making comparison shopping easier,” Joseph Saunders, Visa’s chairman and CEO, said in an October 2009 conference call.

Rightcliq is essentially a place to collect your payment and delivery information. It allows users to collate a “Wishspace” where they can bookmark their desired purchases, comparison shop and e-mail product images to friends. In essence, it’s an emulation of PayPal, which has 81 million active accounts and whose recent partnership with Facebook brings aboard more than 300 million potential customers.

Rightcliq is currently available in beta. Not many details are available right now from Visa, but analysts expect a more robust version to be available in Spring.

Analysts see the move as an attempt to take a share from PayPal, according to Internet Retailer.

“It’s too early to tell if Visa is going to be a challenger,” said Scot Wingo, CEO of ChannelAdvisor Corp . “They can get the consumer usage piece, but working with SMBs and the stored-balance piece remain to be seen.”

Image via CrunchBase

The abundance of location features in social networks, such as FourSquare, Brightkite and more recently Twitter and Google, raise the problem of privacy. Many experts think that these privacy issues will disappear as the localization trend becomes more and more common. Defenders of localization features claim that they don’t raise any privacy problems as users themselves made the choice to participate and share private data with their friends.

This is where Google may be crossing the line, as it chose an “opt-out” solution rather than an “opt-in” solution. Meaning that users are automatically enrolled without being asked and have to “opt-out” if they don’t want to participate.

Indeed, when enrolling in the location-aware mobile app Google Latitude, all of your Google contacts will receive notifications about where you are even though they didn’t sign in to get them. Google sends these alerts automatically if one of your contacts opts in for the service launched early February 2010. As Google explains on its website:

“Alerts are sent to both nearby friends if they are sharing their location with each other, even if only one of them has enabled alerts.”

To prevent being harassed every minute by these kinds of notifications, Google will notify you only when your friends are in “unusual places.” In Google’s words: “Location Alerts are only sent when your friend is at an unusual place during a given time of the week based on their location history, filtering out routine locations such as a daily commute.”

Google Latitude is so intrusive that if you refuse to receive this kind of notification you’ll have no choice but to opt-out of these emails by visiting its website.

The intrusiveness of Google is even more worrying when remembering last week’s Google Buzz, again an “opt-out” solution in which people saw themselves following friends and being followed without being asked. Consequently they were sharing private information with people they didn’t want to.

These new and intrusive products don’t seem to match Google’s corporate motto of “don’t be evil.” On the contrary it makes the giant of the Internet industry even more disturbing…

Earlier yesterday during a press conference, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs was responding to questions about government computers not being able to access sites like Twitter, which comes to no surprise for me. The conversation drifted on over important privacy notes regarding officials’ use of the micro-messaging site.

As part of the Presidential Records Act, established in 1978, the government keeps tracks of all inbound and outbound electronic messages sent from government machines which brings up several important questions. Are tweets considered to be electronic messages? If so, is the White House archiving all of its staff members’ activity on Twitter under the PRA?

The other question that comes to mind is about Gibbs’s followers and the people he follows. Are their activities also archived? I invite you to watch the video below and tell us what you think about it.

I spend infinitely more time on social networks in 2009 than I did in 2008, as did most people, according to Nielsen.

Globally, time spent on social networks increased an average of 2.5 hours per month between December 2008 and December 2009, a growth of 82 percent year-over-year, the research firm announced last Friday.

In December of 2008, people spent an average of just under 3 hours and 4 minutes per month on social networks; in December 2009, the total time jumped to 5 hours and 35 minutes per month.

Obviously, Facebook accounts for most of this time, but it’s amazing to see that the amount of time spent on social networks since the days of static MySpace pages. Sixty-seven percent of global internet users visited Facebook last year, and those who use the site end up spending more than six hours per month on it.

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Experian Hitwise reported today that the number one search term for 2009 was Facebook. That’s really no big surprise, as 5 percent of total internet time is spent on the social networking site.

What is surprising is what happened over at Twitter. The event that was the highest trending topic this year was the Iran elections and the ‘Twitter revolution,’ field reporting and public solidarity with the people of Iran that the microblogging site engendered.

“Among all the keywords, hashtags, and phrases that proliferated throughout the year, one topic surfaced repeatedly,” writes Abdur (no last name given), a researcher at Twitter.

“Twitter users found the Iranian elections the most engaging topic of the year,” Abdur writes. “The terms #iranelection, Iran and Tehran were all in the top-21 of Trending Topics, and #iranelection finished in a close second behind the regular weekly favorite #musicmonday.”

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Women’s presence on social networks is far greater than that of men, according to Pingdom’s demographic study of 19 social networking sites.

Eighty-seven percent of social networks have more female users than males. Those with the highest percentage of female users are Bebo, MySpace, Classmates, Xanga, Ning and Twitter.

Two-thirds of Bebo’s users are female, while MySpace and Classmates have close to that (64 percent each).

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Last week, the Webby Awards named the top ten Internet moments of the decade.

Each of the winners represents how the internet has triumphed over old technologies and practices.

“The Internet is the story of the decade because it was the catalyst for change in not just every aspect of our everyday lives, but in everything from commerce and communication to politics and pop culture,” said David-Michel Davies, the executive director of the Webby Awards.

“The recurring theme among all of the milestones on our list is the Internet’s capacity to circumvent old systems and put more power into the hands of ordinary people,” he said.

The Webby Award’s top ten are:

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