Canada boasts some of the highest internet penetration and social networking usage rates in the world. Social network users view social media as their online home—a hub for communication, entertainment and information.

The report also states that in some cases Canadians are adopting social media faster than in the US. It estimates that about 15.1 million internet users in Canada will have visited social networking sites at least monthly, up from 13.6 million in 2009.

The rankings of social networks by usage (via comScore) is not without some surprises, particularly Windows Live Profile as #2 and DeviantArt as #6.

More information about the report and additional stats can be found here.

Just a few days short of its 4th birthday, Twitter marked a milestone of 10 billion tweets at approximately 16:54:11 Pacific Time on Thursday, March 4, 2010.

That makes approximately 6,925,208 tweets for each of the 1,444 days since Twitter was founded on March 21, 2006. Though, we know that most of those tweets have been in the last year.  In fact, was only 5 months ago that Twitter celebrated the 5 billionth tweet. Just last month Twitter reported that it was processing 50 million tweets a day. That represents 1.2 billion tweets per month and TechCrunch reported that January 2010 saw 75 million unique visitors to Twitter.

But who made the landmark 10 billionth tweet? I asked my friend @Kosso to check the Twitter API for me to find out. However, the tweet was made from a private account.

“One instance where I can say we should ignore our privacy policy: when big round numbers are involved,” proclaimed Twitter employee Doug Williams (@dougw) after the event.

And although we don’t know who made number 10 billion, congratulations will go to Brazilian Rafaela Marques (@lelamarques) on having number 9,999,999,999.

The Twitter team were excitedly watching the numbers tick over and tweeting up a storm to see if one of their own might be the one to score the 10 billionth. (Number 5 billion was made by @robinsloan, who now works at Twitter, as shown below.)

And then, when the moment came,

they celebrated (with a flurry of Macbooks).

The milestone was anticipated earlier today when TechCrunch ran a story highlighting the event and explained that GigaTweet‘s measurement was not entirely accurate. Even Twitter employee Ryan King (@rk) used tweet number 9,995,692,516 to remark:

But since the start, for those of us who’ve been around Twitter for a while, and those who’ve built businesses on and around the simplicity of 140 characters, it’s a time to cheer on the evolution and success of a service that has changed the way we communicate, changed lives and brought so many of us together.

WHAT IS IT?

Back on September 30th, Twitter announced on their blog that they would be launching their new Lists feature to a small group of users to Beta test. Lists allow Twitter users to organize the people they follow into groups. By segmenting your following list into groups, you can then filter tweets from your main stream and just view the tweets originating from a selected list. You can also subscribe to other people’s lists.

HOW DOES IT WORK?

There is a new section in the right-hand sidebar for List management. Create a new list by clicking on New List the sidebar. Give the list a name and it will become a URL that you can use wherever, for example, http://twitter.com/adelemcalear/montrealers. Decide if you want the list public or private.

There is a new Lists drop down menu located beside the Tools menu. From the Lists drop down you can add people to any of your groups from their profile page or from your following list.

If you’ve been added to a list it will show up in a new Lists counter beside the number of following and followers you have. If you’ve added someone to a private list, it will not register on their counter.

When you click on the URL to someone’s list, you are given the single click option to “Follow This List.” According to How Twitter Lists Work, when you follow a list your following count does not increase, because “you don’t have to be following someone to add them to a list.”

When visiting someone’s profile page, you can click on their list counter under their bio to see which lists they have been included on and which they follow. (The Twitter url ends in /lists/membership.)

The Lists membership dashboard shows two tabs: Lists following you and Lists your are following. The Twitter user and name of list on the left side. On this page Following refers to how many people are included on the list. Followers refers to how many people have subscribed to the list.

If you want to view the lists that someone has created themselves, you will see a list of them in the right-hand side bar on that person’s profile page, right underneath their Favorites link. The lists  I followed showed up hear as well.

LIMITATIONS

While merrily starting out making my lists, it occurred to me that I might hit a limit. So I sought out the person I knew who would be trying his best to break the new feature, Robert Scoble. Sure enough, he’d found limits already.

It’s not yet clear if the limit of 20 lists includes created and subscribed to, or created only.

There were some  annoyances that came up in my brief test prior to writing this post.

At this time, you must add people individually to your lists, which could be quite time consuming if you follow a lot of people. It would be much faster if you could select multiple people from your following page and add them in bunches to lists.

There is no way of organizing the order in which your lists appear, either in the drop down menu when adding people or in the right-hand side bar of your profile page. The newest list is always on top, with the oldest at the bottom.

Also, and this has nothing to do with functionality, but the font style used on the individual list pages doesn’t match anything else in the Twitter brand. What can I say? I’m a marketer and for years I’ve worked with companies to build brands through consistency. I find it irritating and unprofessional for a company with $155 million in funding  to launch a new feature that doesn’t  seamlessly blend with the rest of their look and feel.

In Part 2 of this series I’ll look at the impact of Twitter Lists on desktop client applications, followers services and popularity ratings. Read Part 2: Twitter Lists: Developers and Applications

Part 3 will examine the effect of Twitter Lists on popularity.

Part 3 Part 4 will look at the opportunities that brands will have with Twitter Lists.

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When Did You Join Twitter tells you just that. Nothing fancy. But it’s fascinating to see what dates some of the old school social media types joined. It appears October 24, 2006 is a landmark date for Twitter, attracting these early adopter hatchlings: @ChrisBrogan, @newmediajim (Jim Long), @BobGoyetche, @Julien (Julien Smith) and @jmoonah (Jay Moonah).

This sets up some interesting trivia:

• Bob Goyetche and Julien Smith were 2 of the very first podcasters in Canada, and both live in Montreal (like me).

• Bob Goyetche co-founded the PodCasters Across Borders conference, while Chris Brogan co-founded PodCamp. Jay Moonah co-founded PodCamp Toronto and was also an early podcaster.

• Chris Brogan and Julien Smith have gone on to write a book together.

• Both Bob Goyetche and Jim Long have said that they heard about Twitter from Chris Brogan. Jay Moonah said he got an invite from someone at the very first PodCamp in Boston, possibly Chris.

Looking at these early adopters started me thinking about how things go viral. What happened on October 24, 2006 for so many to join the fledgling service? Could Brogan be Patient Zero in the Twitter-gone-viral scenario?

It’s interesting to note that @Scobleizer (Robert Scoble) joined almost a month later than this bunch did, on November 20, 2006.

I’ve always known that I joined April 27, 2007 (Happy 2nd Twitterversary to me!) But it was fun to see that my friend, micro-sharing for business expert @Pistachio (Laura Fitton)  joined the same month, on April 5, 2007.

My First Follow is another great Twitter app from @dacort (Damon Cortesi), who built three of my favouites, DM Whacker, TweetStats and TweepSearch. My First Follow tells you the first 10 people you followed (provided you’re still following them).

My first 10 Twitter follows were:

@julien, @davidusher, @acrossthesound, @jaffejuice, @mynameiskate, @Scobleizer, @socialmediaclub, @shel, @steverubel and @shelisrael.

MyFirstTweet resurrects your long lost first words on Twitter. But, sadly, the service is a little unreliable. Good thing I took a screen shot of mine ages ago.

Use When Did You Join Twitter , My First Follow and MyFirstTweet to do your own historical research of when you too were just a Twitter hatchling.

And if you know who is Twitter Patient Zero, or why so many joined on October 24, 2006, please, let me know!

UPDATE 05/05/09: Thanks to Jay Moonah for providing some additional background information:

Your post got me interested so I dug into my old email file — it appears I got Twitter invites from Chris Brogan and Beth Kanter (http://twitter.com/kanter) on the auspicious date, both of whom I did indeed meet at Podcamp Boston, and both of whom have many thousands of followers more than me… not that I’m bitter. Anyway, I suspect most of the folks you named here also got invited by someone they met at the first Podcamp.

Part of message Chris wrote made me laugh reading it now: “Not exactly spam, but I just wanted to try and add you to my twitter account (which is this um.. I don’t know.. the guys from Odeo made it).“

Brian Chappell at Ignite Social Media in North Carolina was one of the recently selected users given access to test Twitter’s new search and trending features. Twitter announced on their blog that a random subset of users would be selected while they tested the features. But as of last week, more and more people were finding the features on their home pages, indicating that Twitter may be rolling out the features across the service.

The new features see the top menu navigation revamped to read, from left to right: Home, Find People, Help, Sign Out, Trends, Search. You’ll now access your Profile and Settings beside your avatar on your home page.

Entering a keyword into the search field opens a search result page within the Twitter interface, with the Tweeted results below, similar to what you would see on search.twitter.com. According to Wired, the search functionality itself has not changed and you are still not able to search the tweets of subsets of people, like those whom you follow.

The right-hand sidebar area, where followers and following information normally appears, is replaced by Matching users, Featured user and Trending topics.

Matching users are those whose names match the search terms and the results are sorted by those with the most followers. The implication is that people who are already popular and at the top of the list, will receive even more followers from this added exposure.

According to Chappell’s post, Featured user “appears to be some of the top Twitter users in the system”. The criteria for occupying the Featured user spot is unknown.

Trending topics appears below in the sidebar, just as it does on search.twitter.com

Back at the main menu on your home page, the Trends drop down menu displays the same real-time updated trending topics without having to exit to another window. Brian Chappell’s screencast shows all the new features being tested:

It’s clear that Twitter is still experimenting with fully integrating search and trend features into its interface. Twitter has operated these functions at search.twitter.com since last July, when it bought Summize.com, the developers of the features.

With it’s rise in popularity, so many businesses are hopping on the Facebook bandwagon In addition, many companies striking out into this new world don’t realize that there are fundamental differences in functionality between creating a group and creating a fan page. (Check Jason Falls‘ excellent post on Facebook Group and Brand Pages Best Practices for the breakdown.)

If you start a group and you manage to get people to join it, then what? What will members be able to do there, and how will you encourage them to participate?

As most who’ve joined Facebook groups know, the vast majority of the time there is no follow-up by the group owner. With no outbound communication, it’s easy for the member to forget about the group and never return.

However, there are some groups that go overboard with emails, becoming an annoyance in inboxes and inciting members to unsubscribe. The trick is to strike a balance and have a plan.

Before launching your Facebook group, determine your outbound communication strategy. How often will you send the group messages? What will you say in the message? Will you offer group members any incentives to come back to the group page? Will members have any special benefits? And ultimately, how will you make your group so good that your members will invite their friends to join?

You may find that, after consideration, starting a Facebook group isn’t the right tactic to meet your strategic goals. Thinking through all of these considerations before diving in, will help you to be more focused in your efforts, increasing your chances for success, no matter which social network(s), if any, you settle on.

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There are no right or wrong answers, but because people use it in different ways there will be misunderstandings at times. What if you’ve included your business network on Twitter and a relative posts something on your wall that’s a little too personal for your clients to know? How will deleting the comment, or un-tagging a photo affect your real-world relationship? There is great potential for drama and misunderstandings that may end in the ultimate action: unfriending.

Comedy troupe Idiots of Ants did a great skit about Facebook in Real Life, that hit the nail on the head about old school mates, and others, friending you and portraying the least desirable evidence of your past to the rest of your network.

Today on Twitter, I came across another entertaining example of how who you friend on Facebook and the 25 Things meme may cause you to scratch your head and wonder, “wtf?”

(Hat tip @JoeCascio @rhappe. Warning: strong language.)

With Facebook claiming the number one rank in social networks, you may have found that you are getting friend requests  from people who clearly lie outside of your initial plan of who you would connect with. Now what?

I find I’m struggling with this question. I originally started on Facebook with the sole idea of connecting with my widespread family, particularly my Gen Y nephews and nieces. It was an interesting experiment to invite all 13 of them to see who refused to friend their aunt (*ahem* even though I’m the cool aunt). This spread to good friends, then slowly started to expand outwards.

When I began adding more and more of my known business and Twitter network, I started removing the really personal parts of my profile and paying much closer attention to the information I was putting out there for all to see.

Complete strangers started to send me friend invitations and, after looking at their limited profiles, it was clear that we had some social media contacts in common, but without a personal message, I really didn’t know who they were. Ignore. Ignore. Ignore.

Then, I started having second thoughts. What if I was missing opportunities, business or otherwise, by restricting my friends to people I know personally or though direct contact on Twitter? Should I build my Facebook network and have strangers possibly become friends?

I’m waffling.

I actually went as far as contacting Facebook to find out if there was a way of retrieving all of the people whose invitations I ignored, just in case I decided to open it up. (Nope. Once they’re ignored, you can’t get them back.)  Right now, my Facebook request area is like Limbo while I decide how wide I want those doors to be.

So, what do  you think? Do I go mass market (not quite à la Scoble)? Or, do I keep things small and reasonably closed to people I’ve met in person, those I know well enough online and those who’ve bothered to write me a note about how they know me?

What’s your personal Facebook friend policy?

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