And here are few of the changes that i managed to catch:

• Social plugins – by adding just a simple line on HTML to your websites, you can drive engagement – particularly with the Like button and the Activity Feed, which shows users what their friends liked on your sites; and even automate Recommendations of your websites’ content.

There is one very interesting fact about the on-site embeddable “Like” feature – it is supported by RDFa – which means that anyone who wants to use this functionality must also mark-up their pages with semantics, pushing the Semantic Web movement a big step closer towards getting semantic  mark-up throughout the Web.

Still, we’re talking just a simple line of HTML. This is all it takes to make you more social than you were before. Thus Facebook gets a broader sense of our little finger-patterns from all over the Web. Implications? Very significant:

“For example, if you like a band on Pandora, that information can become part of the graph so that later if you visit a concert site, the site can tell you when the band you like is coming to your area. The power of the open graph is that it helps to create a smarter, personalized web that gets better with every action taken.”

• Open Graph Protocol – this one is everything that Google’s Orkut was planned to be, but alas, could not. This protocol turns your pages into “objects” that users can easily add to their profiles. “When a user establishes this connection by clicking Like on one of your Open Graph-enabled pages, you gain the lasting capabilities of Facebook Pages: a link from the user’s profile, ability to publish on the user’s News Feed, inclusion in search on Facebook, and analytics, through our revamped Insights product.“

• The Graph API – supercharged with Facebook’s recent adoption of OAuth2.0, this redesign of the core API is more powerful than it is predecessor. A robust search feature lets you look up people and events, both in public streams and in personalized ones. Real-time updates let you subscribe to updates of user data.

• Community Pages – these are pages on different topics of interest, owned by the people who love them – for example, you can have a community page about “Sushi”, with data from Wikipedia.

For a deeper explanation of all this, you can check out Scobleizer’s breakdown of why this is significant and what it means for Facebook. Also, i recommend you to see Pandora’s CTO sharing how these might impact the music genome project:

FYI: Facebook is swiftly approaching 500 million monthly unique visitors per month. There were 484 million worldwide uniques  in March, up 64% from this time last year!

On average, people log-in about 11 times a month, an increase from 8.5 times a month a year ago.

Expepctedly, Facebook is by far the No.1 social networking platform and had 206.9 million unique visitors in December 2009 – this is 67% of all social media users in the world (jesus…). Time spent on site is also impressive – the average time of a user is almost 6 hours a month… maybe mostly spent in farming and in viewing your friends’ photos.

On average time spent, social networks and blogs are the most visited online platforms. Right behind them are online games and instant messaging.

In the United States Twitter remains the fastest growing social network in terms of unique visitors – with 579% year-over-year increase, by 2.7 million uniques in December 2008 to 18.1 million in December 2009. Month-over-month, however, unique visitors deflated with 5%.

The United States continue to be the leader in terms of social networks and blogs usage, charting a 142.1 million unique visitors with an average time spent of 6 hours per month. The States are followed by Japan, whose unique visitors total 46.6 million for December with an average time spent of nearly 3 hours per month.

While the UK, Italy and Australia are with smaller user numbers (which is normal, because the US have much more citizens in comparison) all of them chart an average time spent between 6 and 7 hours.

What do these results mean?

From this year on, we will see more earnest efforts by marketers to penetrate Facebook and Twitter. If you can not be strategic, however, or if these websites do not fit into your existing marketing strategy – better don’t even try.

There is something else, too, that many people these days fail to notice – businesses offering development of corporate/personal/etc websites are about to face “extinction”. It is much easier, profitable and cost-effective to just go and create a profile on an already existing platform where your audience already is. Consider Basecent, Etsy, Linkedin, Shustir…

And here is the visual data:

- Admit you have a problem, dont tweet it!
- Accept to not validate or comment on a status to feel that you exist.
- Understand that poking a stranger is dangerous.
Repeat: “Alchohol and Twitter do not mix well.” : )
Remove one friend a day.

In the same manner, the website also offers its help to cure your addiction by watching video testimonials and confessions by other addicts. And even better, to share your struggle, they even have a web store selling SMAA t-shirts.

If the addict has still not recovered, after having covered all that is needed, then they can continue their addiction using the new Sony Vaio Mini W-series! This is quite an aggressive advertising message, but it worked for Sony. Sony highlights with a great deal of humor the place of social media in our lives and the risk of addiction that can be caused by excessive use. The campaign is nothing too original for a giant technology company such as Sony, but it is creating buzz by mocking the excessive praise social media gets. At the same time, Sony mock the cold seriousness of the social media critics with its Social Media Addicts Association.