COMSCORE — comScore, Inc., a leader in measuring the digital world, today released a global report on women’s online usage titled, "Women on the Web: How Women are Shaping the Internet," which provides an in-depth analysis of the female Internet user, highlighting key trends by Internet activity, worldwide region and digital channel. Among its results, the report found that social networking sites reach a higher percentage of women than men globally, with 75.8 percent of all women online visiting a social networking site in May 2010 versus 69.7 percent of men...

FORRESTER RESEARCH — Location-Based Social Networks (LBSNs) have been all over the media lately. Foursquare hit 2 million users. Twitter launched, revamped, and re-launched Places. CNNMoney partnered with Gowalla around their popular annual "100 Best Places to Live" list. There’s even a social experiment – PleaseRobMe - that was started in response to the hype around this new social sharing technology. So it’s no surprise that we’ve been getting a lot more questions from marketers lately about these services. Marketers want to know who’s using these services, how often they’re using them, what they’re using them for, how marketers can get involved, and if they should. We dug into our research to try to answer these questions and at a high level, what we found is that just 1% of US online adults are using LBSNs weekly, while 4% of them have tried them at least once...

THE SOCIAL TIMES — The continued proliferation of social networks, further growth of streaming video and the domination of  free mobile apps in the marketplace. No surprises there. But taking a closer look at the quarterly New Media Measure study issued by Interpret reveals a number of less obvious trends in media behaviors, device ownership, attitudes and product consumption. Social networking shows no hints of waning popularity, as usage of social networks has increased 20 percent from the first quarter of 2009. Facebook remains the leader, growing 33% over the past year. Facebook has also become a boon for casual gaming, eclipsing Yahoo! as the most visited gaming site among casual gamers – 28% in the past month have played a game on Facebook (versus 21% for Yahoo!)...

INSIDE FACEBOOK — Facebook privacy is a big issue -- at least to some people. In our latest user survey, we set out to research whether ordinary Facebook users are concerned about the social network’s changing privacy
policies. A quick recap on the issue: Facebook has repeatedly run into criticism over user privacy following various product launches, including news feeds, Connect, and the ill-fated ad platform Beacon. This May, public anger at Facebook appeared to reach a fever pitch as the company released new features that would bring up user information on external websites like Yelp and Pandora. We covered the issues exhaustively on Inside Facebook. However, even our coverage left a question open: do ordinary users care?...

THE SOCIAL TIMES — Two separate studies were conducted this week that suggest that social network and geolocation users are torn right down the middle when it comes to issues of privacy. Both studies showed that for about half of the respondents, privacy is their number one concern. However, this has yet to translate to any mass exodus from either social networks or geolocation services like Foursquare. And one of the surveys indicates that people are actually engaging in behavior that increases their lack of privacy rather than diminishes it. So why are we saying one thing, but doing another when it comes to privacy?...