When it comes to the type of applications iPhone owners use most, ones for checking the weather trump games, music, news and everything else.

According to an upcoming report on smartphone usage by online market research firm Compete, 39% of iPhone users cited weather-related apps as one of the three kinds of applications they use most frequently.

Read the rest of this post

For the Web’s cognoscenti, the lolcats fad is so over. I Can Has Cheezburger, the site that sparked captioned-cat-picture mania, launched in January 2007. The online world’s early adopters learned about the phenomenon that February, when Boing Boing first linked to the site. Over the next few months, lolcats showed up in Gawker, Slate, the Wall Street Journal, and Time. Last October, Eric Nakagawa and Kari Unebasami, the site’s founders, published “I Can Has Cheezburger?: A LOLcat Colleckshun,” a book that spent 13 weeks on the New York Times’ paperback best-seller list. Lolcats are now even showing up on hipster soda bottles. Is there anyone left in America who hasn’t had enough of these cat photos appended with ironic, allusive, peculiarly spelled captions?

Yes—lots of people. More than two years after its launch, I Can Has Cheezburger is still having cheeseburgers. Not only hasn’t it faded, the site is bigger than ever: People keep sending in new pictures, new people keep discovering the phenomenon, and every day traffic grows a bit more. In the last year, according to the traffic-monitoring firm Compete, visits to the site more than doubled.

Read the rest of this post

Looking at a regular graph of traffic data from Digg and Facebook, it would be easy to assume that Digg is lagging far behind Facebook’s staggering growth. However, Compete just produced a very different graph that compares traffic at Digg and Facebook since their respective launches, and according to this data, Digg is actually doing better than Facebook. Facebook is obviously older than Digg, so while it has more traffic now, Digg’s growth since its inception has actually been faster than Facebook’s.

As you can see from the graphs, Digg and Facebook had very similar growth curves for the first four years of their existence, and according to Compete’s historical data, Digg’s traffic was actually greater than Facebook’s for 33 out of 51 months.

It needs to be said, though, that Facebook’s user base has exploded over the last year, while Digg’s traffic “only” grew by about 50 percent, according to Compete. During its fifth year, Facebook’s traffic more than doubled from about 28 million visitors to over 73 million.

Read the rest of this post

When NBC Universal and News Corp. created Hulu, they gave the video portal a valuable but short-term asset: exclusive rights to distribute NBC and Fox shows outside of the media giants’ own websites.

From that base of content, Hulu.com has become the fourth-biggest online video distributor by unique visitors in January, behind YouTube, Yahoo and MySpace, according to the latest from Nielsen VideoCensus. In total video streams, it’s No. 3, with 232 million, behind YouTube (5.8 billion) and Yahoo (277 million).

But the exclusive part of that NBC-News Corp. deal lasts only two years, and Hulu knows all too well that the scarcity that helped it establish an audience (and brand) is going away soon. Hulu has never said exactly when the deal expires, but it’s likely within a year after the first anniversary of Hulu’s public launch, in March.

Read the rest of this post

‘Tis the season to make year 2009 predictions. Today, Standard & Poor’s analysts released their predictions for the Internet in 2009. Scott Kessler, Internet analyst with S&P, says Microsoft (MSFT) and Yahoo (YHOO) will “finally bury the hatchet” next year “and decide to join forces to better compete against Google” (GOOG). Kessler says Microsoft won’t buy Yahoo (well, they’ve already said they were no longer interested in that), but rather pursue a joint venture “related to search.” He thinks that could lift Yahoo shares, to which he assigns a “Buy” rating.

Read the rest of this post

We recently wrote about how you should probably be more nervous about the data your ISP is collecting rather than what Google is collecting, because your ISP has access to a lot more data, and the data it has isn’t data that you chose to give, as in the case of Google. Plus, ISPs have a long history of selling that data. Now, a new study is showing that most people have no idea that their ISPs track and sell their data, with many believing that an ISP would need to first let them know if they were doing that. In fact, many people are quite concerned about how that data would be used, not realizing that it’s already being sold. And, of course, it’s not just being sold to ad companies like NebuAd and Phorm, but to Web site-tracking firms like Compete and Hitwise.

Read the rest of this post