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Very interesting post from Mashable today, reporting this research from Flurry. Shows that the most frequently used applications on Smartphones are Social Networking applications, while people spend the most time on news applications.  

It is not necessarily new news, because from an intuitive standpoint we are all aware of the intesection between mobile and social. What is interesting is seeing from a quantitative standpoint how important social applications are for smartphone users.  There is also an important implication for social marketers: assessing what if any are the mobile implication for any social program becomes an essential step in program design….

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How do I chat thee?
Let me count the ways:

I can chat thee old school
face to face and toe to toe
our meat mouths moving
air vibes chafing the drums in our ears.

I can chat thee through chat boards
Do they still have chat boards?
Do they still know if you’re a dog?
Do the pheromones still hang as sweet and loud?

I can chat thee on AOL
the running man messenger
claims my home page as his own
and where did that tool bar come from?

I can chat thee on Twitter
but does everyone see our repartee?
Does our use of hash tags
mean it’s for their benefit?

I can chat thee on Facebook
in so many ways
wall to wall or that box in the corner
or we both can make comments on something we Like.

I can chat thee on Google
by email, by Wave, by another box in the corner.
Don’t mind that they’re watching
every thing that we say, every thing that we might do.

I can chat thee on Mobile
with Facebook and Twitter and old AOL
with SMS we can text our innermost thoughts
to each others mobile phone, with pictures.

How did I chat thee?
On what channel did we parse
our arrows of connection?
And did we leave a trace?

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This Wall Street Journal article is significant not so much for it’s insight into the changing face of internet messaging (which boils down to “Kids these days!”) but rather for the acknowledgment that email is losing (lost?) it’s place as the primary communication channel. Now any article that ends with a whinge about why not try just “talking to someone in person” isn’t likely to have much to say about how to manage your place in this new world of communications, but it does do a good job of describing the angst that many people have about a world where Twitter, Facebook and Yammer are where the real conversations are happening.  The article also recognizes the increased importance of defining, managing and projecting your identity (but misses the critical role that email has in managing your identity).

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Social media is a broadly used term that includes a wide range of techniques and tools for leveraging and supporting the sharing of information among people. Internet enabled tools are the locus for social media activity as they provide low-cost access to many people allowing for a new wave of targeted advertising to develop. As social media continues to grow at a near exponential rate, marketers and researchers alike are becoming increasingly interested in the practices of the users who help shape the content at highly participatory social media sites. Digg.com is an exemplar site for user participation in social media and is the focus of this report. Understanding the behavior of Digg.com users will help marketers to better represent and promote their material on Digg.com as well as provide insights into the practices of social media users in general.

In this report, we present an analysis of user engagement with social med…

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