Marketing software maker HubSpot has analyzed close to 9 million Twitter profiles based on data collected through its Twitter Grader tool, and has come to the conclusion that accounts with a profile picture average about 10 times more followers than those without.

That on itself is not so surprising; a Twitter profile associated with the default avatar generally screams ‘newbie’, which is generally an incentive not to follow someone unless you know that person in real life or on other social networks. There’s a good reason why spammers who create fake Twitter accounts tend to include pictures in profiles – it’s human nature to instantly trust personalized online accounts more than generic ones.

But we love stats here at TechCrunch, so here you go:

(Via Mike Volpe, who has a pretty good profile picture)

In the 2000 elections, incumbent Republican Senator John Ashcroft was defeated by Governor Mel Carnahan in the race for one of Missouri’s U.S. Senate seats. The only problem? Carnahan was dead.

I’m reminded of this while looking over the traffic logs for TechCrunch, because it appears that someone else is losing to a dead rival: Google Buzz. According to our data, in the past month, Google Buzz has been sending less traffic to TechCrunch than FriendFeed — the service which is essentially the same as Buzz, only better, and ever since the acquisition by Facebook has been a ghost town.

But apparently, a ghost town still sends more traffic than the much buzzed-about Buzz. In the past month, FriendFeed is the #52 referrer of traffic to TechCrunch (in its heyday, it was occasionally in the top 20), Google Buzz, meanwhile, is at best #55. I say “at best” because it’s hard to know exactly how much traffic Buzz is sending because it’s built into Gmail. But still, I’ve drilled down into the subdomains to look for clues that it’s Buzz sending the traffic. Obviously, a solid chunk from the mail.google.com domain is coming from Buzz, and also some from google.com where Google Buzz profiles are hosted.

Looking over a handful of popular stores on TechCrunch over the past month, Google Buzz is nowhere to be seen anywhere near the top referrers. This, along with conversations I’ve had with others about their referrals leads me to believe that Buzz is actually quite horrible at doing the job it set out to do: share information. What’s the point of sharing links on Buzz and having other people comment and like it if no one is actually reading any of the content itself? The TechCrunch account has some 7,700 followers (and when you added in individual author accounts that also share our posts, we have well over 10,000 followers) and yet we’re seeing hardly any traffic from the social service. And that’s after we even made our own Buzz button.

All that being said, there is evidence that Buzz is helping to boost sharing on Google Reader, because it did help make Google Profiles more social. But still, Reader shares a miniscule when compared to rivals Twitter and Facebook. And again, Buzz was supposed to be the service that made sharing super-easy. And it’s shoved in the face of Gmail’s hundreds of millions of users, so these referral numbers are pretty pathetic.

While it may be a ghost town, FriendFeed remains the example of what Buzz should be when it comes to sharing content. One reason it still destroys Buzz: Twitter. For much of its life, tweets accounted for most of the data coming into FriendFeed. Early on, with a built-in Twitter account link, tweets were also popular on Buzz. The problem is that Buzz inexplicably delays tweets for as many as 12 hours before bulk importing them all from the day — which is beyond annoying. For this reason, myself and others have unsubscribed from anyone on Buzz who imports tweets. Google has access to Twitter’s firehose, so I have no idea why they can’t import these tweets in realtime, as the small FriendFeed team was able to do. Undoubtedly, that would help with the sharing problem.

But Google may not want to do that. After all, it’s not trying to build just another front-end for Twitter. It wants to be its own service — one of Facebook proportions. Unfortunately, that’s just not happening right now. And I’m seriously starting to doubt if it ever will. Those changes can’t come soon enough.

[image: Miramax]

The problem with having more than a million followers on Twitter, or even more than 1,000, is that you don’t really know who they are. But Hunch thinks it knows a lot about the followers of at least popular Twitter users. It is now pulling together detailed psychographic profiles of those followers with a new Twitter Followers tool.

For instance, Hunch suggests that if you follow TechCrunch on Twitter—as close to 1.4 million of you do—you are more likely to be entrepreneurial, very experienced in your career, and talk about computers “like a gear head talking about a four-barrel V8 engine.”

It also predicts that you are more likely to have bought someone flowers in the past 6 months, get birthday cakes from expensive bakeries, and are an optimist (if you drop a piece of toast you believe it will land butter-side up). I’ve met some of you, and I’m not so sure you’d buy anyone an expensive cake. But some of the other characterizations seem spot on.

Hunch is using this Twitter follower analyzer as a clever way to get more people to check out its taste recommendation engine. Any question-answer pair can be Tweeted out with a link back to the full analysis. It only works right now for Twitter accounts with more than 1,000 followers (to keep everything anonymous). Hunch looks at the overlap between those followers and its own users, who have already answered dozens of taste-related questions, and extrapolates from there. This is slightly different from the Twitter Predictor game it released last week which predicts how you will answer a set of questions based on your Twitter profile and who you follow.

Breaking down the psychographics and predilections of someone’s Twitter followers could be useful one day if anyone ever figures out how to advertise to those followers in a way that doesn’t make them want to unfollow you. But for now it is just a fun exercise.

How accurate is it? Let’s put it to the test. My personal followers for @erickschonfeld on Twitter, according to Hunch, tend to be early adopters of of technology (check), use an iPhone (probably), don’t wait for the crosswalk sign to change before they cross the street (I’m pretty sure that’s true), prefer fluid and flexible jobs (check), and consider a “reasonable number of hours to work” to be “whatever it takes” (yup, that’s how my posse rolls).

Looking at some other media accounts, followers of the HuffingtonPost tend to be liberals (I am as shocked), think Bill Maher is funny (which might be their real problem), and don’t realize Elton John can be cheesy . Gawker followers tend to be more “conceptual” than “factual” (draw your own conclusions). Lance Armstrong’s followers are “extremely” competitive and “don’t like kittens” (no idea). While Jimmy Fallon’s followers are more likely to have been in a car accident. I couldn’t make these up if I tried.

Hunch plans to follow up with another Twitter tool where it will try to tell you what kinds of things, people, or products you might like or dislike, as opposed to your followers. It will only be visible to you after you sign in via your Twitter account. To learn more about Hunch’s approach to creating a “taste graph” of its users, check out this recent video interview with co-founder Caterina Fake.

When I first read about Hunch’s Twitter Predictor game, I was pretty skeptical. The game asks you to put in your Twitter user name and based on who you follow and who you are followed by, it predicts how you will answer questions on Hunch. Then I used it. It’s awesome. Well, pretty awesome.

Out of 35 questions I answer, Hunch correctly predicted by my answer to 32 of them and was only wrong with 3, 91% correct. And these aren’t just “yes” or “no” question, some have several possible answers. In fact, the game got so many right that at first I was sure it was all fake and they were just saying they were going to pick what I eventually did. Then I noticed the “take a peek” link, which tells you before you answer the question how you’re going to answer it.

I also wondered if Hunch was simply predicting how I’d answer based on other Hunch questions I had answered on my account. But actually, the game works even if you’re logged out of your Hunch account.

So yes, the predictor made by new Hunch employee Ben Gleitzman (a former Googler) is very accurate. But then I noticed something. As I played it again in another browser, the game asked the exact same questions. And the first question is always about my age range. So this is likely one of the keys to how the predictor works. Another friend had a series of questions that made it clear she was a woman — likely another key predictor.

I would bet the game is quickly scanning your Twitter followers and getting some obvious topical data, such as age range and sex. Then it uses the aggregate Hunch data that the service has collected over the past several months.

Still, it’s a pretty cool idea. And a great way to show off the data Hunch is collecting. The team answers more about the game here.

We’re here at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas where Twitter co-founder Evan Williams doing a keynote Q&A with Umair Haque. Williams may use the time to talk a bit about Twitter’s upcoming ad platform. Update: It’s actually an “At Platform” called At Anywhere — more here.

Interestingly enough, Twitter saw its first burst of popularity three years ago at this very conference.

Below find my live notes (paraphrased):

UH: Ev you have something pretty interesting you want to say today?

EW: Yeah, we want to announce something. We wanted to announce our new “At Platform” (undoubtedly to be spelled an @ Platform) – a way to integrate Twitter into any website. “At Anywhere” – basically this allows you to place the Twitter hovercards on any site. We have 13 sites we’re launching with including Amazon, ebay, Yahoo, Digg, Bing, Meebo, Salesforce.

UH: So what can you do with this?

EW: You can easily tweet from any page that is using this. Also, maybe you want talk to authors of posts without going to Twitter itself, you can just hover over their name and tweet them. Twitter is a very easy way to keep in touch.

UH: So this helps you contextualize information. But why would sites use this?

EW: A connection to users you didn’t have before – and it keeps people coming back. And it will result in more followers for a site. Also, hopefully more people who are your fans using twitter to talk about you or your content. And you can bring in users’ tweets talking about your site.

UH: So it’s a platform to juice up site’s networks and virility. But it’s an “At Platform” not an “Ad Platform”.

EW: Yeah, it’s about lowering the barrier for information.

UH: What makes 21st century businesses different? Like Twitter? The first principle to me is experimentation. Why are you willing to explore different possibilities?

EW: Experimentation lets you create value. “Whatever you assume when you start out, you’re wrong.” Most of the great businesses of our time have experimented. Like Google.

UH: So it’s about creating value, then figuring it out?

EW: Yes, it’s about creating experience for users and businesses. There is a ton of business use on Twitter today — it’s one of the biggest uses. We want to make that better, easier, faster.

UH: What is Twitter evolving to?

EW: What is Twitter has always been a tough question to answer. We think of it as an information network — different from a social network. It’s about getting info and also sharing. You can take advantage of Twitter without sharing anything about your life. We need to increase the signal-to-noise ratio.

UH: So better information, better connections, better choices.

EW: Yes.

UH: Experimentation is about iteration. So how does that happen at Twitter?

EW: We have a bunch of awesome people in the company now. We’ve grown very quickly over the past year. Our employee growth curve is almost like our user growth curve now. We have people on focused teams, like mobile, or internationalization. We’re worried about central thinking and slow processes. So we tell our teams to “go for it.”

UH: So what’s your role?

EW: I don’t get into the nuts and bolts of code, cause things would be a big mess. I spend most of my time thinking about the high level issues. And I think a lot about the company – how do we scale the company, about our culture, etc. How do we define the characteristics we want. I think there is a parallel between the service and the company — openness is huge, transparency.

UH: So openness is very important. Help us trace the arc of openness at Twitter.

EW: Yeah, it means a lot of things. We debated if openness or transparency. “A window is transparent, but a door is open.” The users have taken Twitter and morphed it into what they want it to be. Now developers are doing the same thing. Openness is really a survival technique.

I sit down with new employees when they start and go over 9 assumptions you should have about working at Twitter. One key one is assume there are more smart people outside the company than insides.

UH: What about giving the golden goose away? Why be so open?

EW: That was a big question for us – the deals with Bing and Google. These were the first guys we shared our full stream with. There’s a lot of debate about that. Because we don’t have a business model yet, so why give it away? But we went back to the principle of giving users the most value.

There are 50 million tweets a day, how do we show you the best ones for you? Right now, we don’t do a good enough job of that. But with these partnerships, we have more chances to do that.

UH: Was there a lot of internal debate about this?

EW: Yeah, there was a ton. But we decided it was good. And now we’ve expanded the deals – like with Yahoo. And a few weeks ago we talked about giving this data to thousands of others.

Now third party developers are building a lot of value. Like adding pictures to Twitter.

CoTweet and HootSuite are really interesting too. Twitter.com isn’t a good interface for doing customer support, but those guys are. CoTweet just got acquired by a company that wants to focus on that more.

We’d love to see much more focus on creating these deep experiences that create value.

UH: So experimentation and openness. Other companies want control, like Apple. How open are you guys?

EW: We’re pretty open – there is some control we need to employ because if we were infinitely open we’d be doing a disservice to users. Openness can work against you still. It has to be managed a lot. Having an open API makes it easier to make apps that will spam users. We send cease and desists everyday to companies making spam tools. We have to exert some control.

UH: I think shepherding is a good way to put it. So you had some interesting use recently – such as the earthquake in Chile.

EW: I got an email recently about the earthquake, thanking us for helping with the situation. This is very gratifying for us because we’ve always held it important for Twitter to reach the weakest signals in the world. We started out with a big focus on SMS – and it’s still really important to us. Because it reaches so many people. We have deals with 65 carriers around the world to send these SMS tweets.

We’re at the beginning. We’re seeing really strong growth in India where SMS is huge. And in the Middle East.

UH: I think this changing the world stuff is the future for entrepreneurs. It gets to the heart of the point about inclusiveness. So – what is an “active user”?

EW: To me it comes back to – is someone getting value out of Twitter? If they don’t have an account it’s hard to know, like people who search Google for tweets. In the beginning we put a lot of focus on telling the world or your friends and family what you’re doing. But now there is something interesting on Twitter for everyone – like the Flaming Lips being on Twitter, you can get updates on the band.

And as more people start getting information on Twitter, they’re more likely to get involved.

UH: Someone has started using Twitter inside the White House, right?

EW: Yeah, it’s really interesting that it’s from in the White House. It’s an official channel, but they’re using it a different type of way. It’s about reducing the walls between people with a lot of influence, and those who they influence. And that’s the most profound promise of the Internet. This is the wave I started on 10 years ago with blogging. It’s about the democracy of information. Anyone can put information on the web — that’s huge.

UH: Tweet Minister in the UK aggregates the tweets from members of parliament. This is re-wiring society in some ways. But we also have a counter-force – like state control of information.

EW: In some regions, yes, this is bad and hurting the web. But the Internet is a tidal wave that you will not be able to keep out. Like in China, who knows how long those firewalls will hold up – but not forever.

UH: Yes, there are many ways to get through the firewalls already. There’s a lot of pressure on them.

Let’s talk about “betterness.” I booked a trip to his five star resort in an exotic land. When I got there, it was a shack. The manager couldn’t do anything — so I put it on Twitter. Within 15 minutes the booking company called me, and in 20 minutes I got a new hotel. In a half an hour my vacation was fixed.

EW: That’s great. Our hope is that this is the norm, not a fluke. We have a bit of a dichotomy, because there is more everyday you want to search for. We don’t just want to maximize that, we hope to make Twitter more useful to you. We want to decrease time you spend on Twitter, not increase it.

Recently we went through a process to define our operating principles. The number one principle is “be a force for good.” Another principle is “pay attention.”

UH: David Pogue did a campaign against hidden charges from the carriers. It’s the same thing with the hotel operator and me. I know you’re a big fan of Warren Buffet – he also believes in creating real value.

EW: Yes, from a business perspective, Twitter needs to fundamentally be about helping people make better decisions. Or the help something happen that normally wouldn’t. Like the donations to Haiti through text message — we weren’t taking the money, but it spread virally through Twitter. People want to help each other out, we need to reduce the friction.

UH: Is that what you want to do with the new At Platform?

EW: Yes, totally. We’ll see what happens, the obvious stuff is more tweeting, but I think it’s a lowering of the friction as well.

UH: You ask yourself, how would i make Walmart better? Why ask yourself that?

EW: Because as we look at how businesses are using Twitter – we want our tool to help businesses get better.

The world is so often a black box where there is no communication. There’s a lack of dialogue and a lack of transparency. The promise of all these technologies is that this goes away. You close the loop.

UH: Outline for us your big picture goals.

EW: Fostering the open exchange of information. To be a force for good. The ease of exchange of information is important. Help out other people with something as small as a retweet. That’s our ambition.

UH: Google is all about archiving the world’s information. Yours is different — creating new information.

It’s all about advantage though – what’s your advantage.

EW: Our advantage will only come if everyone wins. We only do win-win deals. Because any deal where someone is losing is unsustainable. That’s why we haven’t turned on the revenue yet — there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit, but none of it is sustainable.

Creating an advantage for other people and not giving them a reason to work around you – that’s key.

UH: Is the Internet making a better media industry?

EW: I think there’s a huge shift going on – but it’s an ecosystem where everything is involved. This user-generated content just makes things richer. Blogging and traditional media work together. Twitter compliments traditional media. I was talking last night to some guys from CNN – it’s helped them change what they do. It’s a win-win.

UH: How will the At Platform speak to that?

EW: Hopefully these guys will us it to get the new out there.

UH: What makes you tick?

EW: There are two types of entrepreneurs. What drives me is creating things that didn’t exist before. Your product or service should be at the end of the sentence: “wouldn’t it be awesome if…”

It’s creating new stuff versus extracting from old stuff. There are people who look at money as the goal versus the teams. I create businesses to make new things. It’s a fuel for creating more things in the world. I’ve been lucky to stumble upon things that have helped change the world.

UH: Why focus on these things though?

EW: Largely luck. But maybe it’s what interests me. Twitter was a side project of Odeo – my cofounders came up with it. Blogging was a side project too at one point.

UH: If something is awesome, people will use it.

EW: Yes.

Also, helping others succeed is a sub principle of ours.

UH: Tell us one or two more of them.

EW: Be a force for good, pay attention — make things happen is another one. There’s also building a culture of trust.

UH: What are your big lessons to other entrepreneurs?

EW: Create something you want to exist in the world. Another is focus. Many people are trying to do a lot of things when they should be doing one thing. You may be wrong with whatever you’re trying out, but you’ll try other things.

A lot of the great companies are now coming from outside Silicon Valley. You don’t have to be there.

That’s a wrap.

Last November, MSNBC acquired the Twitter account @breakingnews, which was started as a basic newswire by Michael van Poppel and gradually grew to 1.4 million followers (it’s now up to over 1.6 million). A month later, MSNBC announced that it had acquired BreakingNews.com, which has become a web portal for the online newswire. And today, it’s managed to complete the trifecta: MSNBC has just launched a Facebook Page at Facebook.com/BreakingNews.

MSNBC spokesperson Gina Stikes says that the new Facebook account will only send updates for the biggest stories to break (you can still use its other feeds if you want to receive every story to come from the service). The page is obviously still quite new (it only has 645 fans right now), but you can expect that the grow quickly.

Just how quickly is the big question, though: we’ll have to wait to see if MSNBC will be able to leverage its large community on Twitter to establish its Facebook page.  In any case, it’s managed to take ownership of the term “breaking news” across a large swath of the web, which is no small feat.

Earlier today, the latest version of Foursquare, 1.6, went live in the App Store for a brief period of time. I’ve been using the build for a couple of days, and while the functionality isn’t all that different from the previous versions, the look-and-feel has been completely revamped.

This is notable because the vast majority of Foursquare users are still using the iPhone (67%). So this update will be a welcome change for many, especially as Foursquare and Gowalla continue to compete. Gowalla, while smaller than Foursquare, is generally considered to be the prettier of the two. Certainly, with its new website revamp, Gowalla still holds that title on the web, but the new Foursquare app looks pretty nice compared to the Gowalla iPhone app now.

So what’s different? The entire color palette is now a mixture of silver, blue, white, and bright green. Some may not like the bright green elements, but it’s effective to let people know where to click when you want to check-in. Also new is the fact that the “Shout” button is emphasized on the upper left part of the main screen. “Shouting” is basically the equivalent of tweeting out a message, it allows you to send a message to your followers without having to check-in at a place. It’s a bit odd that this is now a main button on the left side while the “Check-in” button is on the right side (considering most people read left to right).

Another new element is the idea of categories. As we wrote about a couple of days ago, Foursquare is starting to categorize venues into certain categories. While there isn’t much you can do with these yet on the new iPhone app, you are able to see icons that represent how a venue is categorized.

Something else new that is nice is that you can click on individual venues in your friend stream to load that venue’s main screen (which now shows who is there, right away). Previously, you had to click on your friend, then click over to see the venue — so this saves time.

While using the app, I wondered if Apple would approve it given that it uses the text, email, and phone icons used by the iPhone itself within the app (see screenshot below), but apparently if they accidentally put it in the store today, they’re going to be okay with those icons. These icons are shown on the new profile pages, which also show how many mayorships a member as, as well as how many badges they’ve earned. Interestingly, the point-based element of the app has been depreciated a bit, as that’s how a harder-to-get-to area of the app.

As a bonus to this advanced iPhone preview that some users got today, Foursquare also launched a new version of its Android app tonight. I’ve been playing with that for a few minutes, and that seems very solid as well. Look for the new version of Foursquare iPhone app at some point late next week when SXSW starts.

As Conan has just tweeted out, he has decided to follow someone finally. A random person. As he notes, “I’ve decided to follow someone at random. She likes peanut butter and gummy dinosaurs. Sarah Killen, your life is about to change.“

Indeed.

Killen, from Michigan, has exactly 1,300 followers as of the writing of this post (just a few minutes after Conan’s tweet). You can expect that to skyrocket very quickly. As Killen notes, “Having a lame ass day, Russell Bigos is an idiot. And Conan O’Brien is THE SHIT.”

Update: In just a few minutes, Killen has doubled her Twitter followers to now exactly 2,600.

Foodspotting is an application that allows you to take picture of a food, say what it is, and pin it (with geolocation) to the restaurant where you got it. You may wonder who would use such an app — but just think for a second about how many of your friends on Twitter tweet out pictures of food. People have been doing this long before Foodspotting, this app just gives them more of an incentive to do so, and let’s them organize it.

It’s also one hell of a new food discovery tool. And that’s exactly why the team behind it, Alexa Andrzejewski and Ted Grubb, hustled to get the official iPhone app done in time for the SXSW festival, which starts next week in Austin, Texas. With it, you’ll be able to use the “Guides” to easily find (and contribute to) the best foods in Austin. The Foodspotting team put together a few of these guides (including a scavenger hunt, and a street food one), but other users have already created others as well.

From these guides, you can easily mark which foods you “want” to bookmark them for later. You can also note which foods you’ve already eaten (“nommed”). Of course, you can also use the app to search for a particular food or restaurant. Or simply scroll through the pictures on the main screen to see a stream of food (which can be sorted by “latest,” “nearest,” “best,” etc). And yes, you can use a map view to see the food too.

When you yourself spot a food, you can tweet it out to your followers. Or, thanks to Foursquare’s relatively new API, you can also check-in to a venue simply by foodspotting (yes, the service hopes the name becomes a common verb).

It’s one of the most interesting location-based plays that will be on display at SXSW — a conference that will be rife with location-based services. But Foodspotting is a bit different because they’re not aiming to be a location platform like Foursquare or Gowalla. Instead, they’re happy to use location to augment their own reality-based game. That is, after all, essentially what Foodspotting is. Just like with the other two aforementioned location services, you earn some badges for tagging certain types of foods in pictures (they called them “Expert Badges”). And you earn others for participating in the Guides. And, of course, there are points for doing all of this.

While the “lite” version of the app has been available in the App Store for a few months, the team has done little to promote it, waiting instead until the full version, which launches today in the App Store. Still, the lite version (and the very nice-looking website) proved that there’s a demand for this service. Already, Foodspotting has seen over 15,000 foodspottings. Top cities include San Francisco, New York, and Honolulu.

So how do you make money off of this idea? That’s a question the Foodspotting team has had to answer a lot recently, as they’re currently in the process of raising a seed round of funding. The natural idea is to become popular enough that restaurants and brands want to partner with the service to promote themselves. ”It’s kind of like pumping a scent out of your bakery window to draw people in,” Andrzejewski says. Already, the service is teaming up with 7×7, an insider’s guide to food in San Francisco to show how a partnership could work (it’s a non-paid partnership, for now).

The iPhone app, created for Foodspotting by EGG HAUS, Inc, is available today in the App Store for free. Find it here. Eventually, the plan is to expand to the other mobile platforms as well.

You know all those share buttons across the Web? They are getting more and more social. What I mean by that is initially they were used to share stories or content mostly via email on a one-to-one basis, but over the past year or so services like Facebook and Twitter have been overtaking the way people use those buttons to share stories, videos, images, and links.

The way most people interact with these button is through widgets on publisher’s sites. But one of the largest sharing button networks, ShareThis, is about to turn that around and introduce a Share Stream which shows you what your Facebook friends are sharing across the Web. Soon your Twitter followers will be added as well (at launch you will only be able to see what everyone is sharing across Twitter). Of course, the Share Stream is also available as a customizable widget to show on any site.

A link at the bottom of each ShareThis widget will invite you to find out what your friends are sharing. When you click on it, you will be taken to a Share Stream where you can log in using your Facebook, Twitter, Google, or Yahoo IDs. There you will see what your else people are sharing from the site you just came from or about the same topic as the page you were on. The Share Stream can be filtered by trending or real-time topics, by source, by what everyone is sharing, or only by what your friends are sharing.

ShareThis gets its data from the 130,000 sites which use its sharing buttons and collectively reach 430 million unique visitors a month. Its No.1 competitor AddThis is somewhat bigger, but ShareThis recognizes the same users across sites and creates a semantic index of the every page where its buttons are placed. Using a taxonomy based on Wikipedia categories, ShareThis can figure out the topics associated with each page that is shared. Thanks to this topic knowledge, ShareThis can suggest other pages on related topics which are also being shared by your friends or more generally.

CEO Tim Schigel plans to create an ad network of sorts which will let publishers and advertisers target ads to people based on what they are sharing based on browser cookie data (yup, every time you share, you are being tracked, anonymously). He keeps data on engagement levels after people share content, and while the pageviews resulting from each click are still highest for email, Facebook is catching up. And Facebook has a bigger multiplier effect (on average three different people click on each shared link versus just one for email) which puts it over the top in terms of impact. Twitter’s multiplier effect is six times higher (18 clicks per link), but its engagement levels are much lower.

More importantly, people who follow a link from Facebook, says Schigel, “are 50 percent more engaged,” on average, than people who find the same page from search. Intuitively that makes sense because there is more hit or miss with search results compared to following a suggested link from someone you trust.

Like other sharing networks, ShareThis has seen Facebook soar to 42 percent of all sharing, beating out email (at 40.7 percent) for the first time in February. Twitter represents 8.7 percent of all sharing via the ShareThis button. So the Share Stream pretty much already exists on Facebook and Twitter alone.