COMPETE BLOG — In recent months, I’ve noticed the term "groupon" creeping into conversations with increasing regularity. The term comes from groupon.com, a website devoted to offering a new deal each day and built around the tagline of "collective buying power." The site is targeted to various cities across the country, and each day features a steep discount at a local establishment. In order for the groupon to be activated for that day, a certain number of people must join the deal. Once that number is reached, the deal is on and everyone who signed up receives the Groupon coupon by email...

MEDIAPOST — Facebook and Twitter both saw triple-digit traffic growth on the mobile Web even as MySpace lost ground to its social networking rivals among cell phone users in the last year. Facebook's U.S. audience on the mobile Web more than doubled to 25.1 million in January 2010 compared to a year ago, while Twitter's grew fourfold to 4.7 million, according to data released Wednesday by comScore. By contrast, MySpace's mobile Web audience declined 7% to 11.4 million during the same period...

INSIDE FACEBOOK — Nielsen is the latest web measurement company to release a review of social networking traffic in 2009, and most of the results aren’t too surprising:  Both the number of users to social networking sites and the amount of time they spent increased substantially, with Facebook leading the way. Here’s our quick take...

READWRITEWEB — Twitter just announced that it now sees 50 million non-spam messages every day. That's interesting but it means more when you look at it in context. The company says that means there are 600 tweets per second. According to a separate Tweet by Twitter's new VP of Communications this afternoon, approximately 83 tweets per second contain product or brand references (20%). Here are some other interesting numbers and an official chart. Putting Twitter in context, Facebook and YouTube remain much larger. Twitter is showing remarkably strong growth, though. Some interesting data points...

INSIDE FACEBOOK — Facebook had another strong month across Asia and the Middle East, growing by 8.5% in January to reach 73.5 million monthly active users. But as with other parts of the world, many smaller countries that grew first are now maxing out; with large portions of their online populaces on Facebook, there’s no room left to grow. Meanwhile, big countries in Asia are surging. Even though some have millions of users already, they have a lot of room left to grow. We’re seeing the same trend in Europe and other parts of the world...