465 million. That’s the staggering number of Twitter accounts there are in the world, according to the latest infographic design from Infographic Labs. The infographic takes a look at the current state of things at Twitter, which we can all agree has virtually revolutionized “microblogging”.

Other interesting facts that caught our eye: that celebrity statuses only receive 21% of retweets (“interesting content” leads with 92%), and that there are 11 Twitter accounts created every second. read more

Wondering how Facebook is doing so far this year?

We learned quite a lot about them from their IPO filing last February 1st- and, although it should come as no surprise, this infographic design by Infographic Labs shows us that everybody’s favorite social network is performing extremely well, thanks to 845 million active users. read more

Holiday travel is almost as much of a tradition in the United States as the holiday’s themselves. Wanting to examine holiday travel trends from last years travel Foursquare created an infographic that shows how people traveled from Halloween until just after Christmas 2010.

In the graphic planes, trains and automobiles (Steve Martin would be happy) were plotted out to show how people traveled and from which destinations they traveled.

To compile their data Foursquare examined the two airports each traveler checked into (departing and arriving airports) and they did the same for train stations. To determine automobile traffic they then used checkins on major highways and roads to show how heavily trafficked major interstates have become during the holiday travel season.

You’ll also notice that the team at Foursquare plotted out a timeline which shows the peaks that occur during Thanksgiving and Christmas and on a smaller level during New Years Eve.

One thing missing is the number of checkins for each activity which would have been nice to examine in order to better understand what modes of transportation are chosen by the most people during holiday travel.

Here’s the Foursquare travel infographic:

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The Rise In Popularity Of Instagram

With the increasing popularity of social media communication, here comes another application that’s been creating a huge buzz around the internet for a while now: the image uploading app. Instagram. Instagram is so popular that it has gained more than 4.5 million users in less than a year. Like Twitter, members can follow your posts but instead of words, you get to post photos and then your follower can “like” your photos and leave you comments, for whatever reason, many people are fascinated by this. But what’s even more amazing about Instagram is that even professional fashion photographers and Hollywood celebrities are getting hooked by its immense popularity. It has even caught the attention of the number one social media site: FaceBook.

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Although the profession “Social Media Expert” too often sighted is on CVs already, the kids of today have grown up and are ready to graduate as “Social Media Experts”. Although many will argue that Bulletin Boards and platforms such as the Usenet were a form of social media already, it is rather simple to accept that they aren’t representative of Social Media in our day and age.
The students now in high school are the first generation to have grown up with social media omni-present and will soon graduate, and be employed by companies who have social media policies and guidelines. Policies which will restrict freedom to share online. Before being hired job candidates might already be screened and their social media profile might be profiled for your online activity over the last seven years.

Social Media doesn’t have to be as negative or fearful all the time though and the crew at Flowtown have created a great and funny infographic about the social media landscape in 2011. If you were in high school right now, would you be the Digg boy, or the band geek? Or the Jock? read more

On March 21, 2006 a tiny little micro-blogging service was born out of 140 characters when founder Jack Dorsey tweeted “inviting coworkers” becoming the first “human” to send a message, four months later the service was launched to the public and since that time more than 200 million Twitterers have joined the site.

With 200 million users of course comes a bunch of insanely large milestones, for example the infographic below showcases the fact that 350 billion tweets are posted to the site daily. If it’s still true that 3% of all Twitter mentions come from Justin Bieber that would mean the singer heartthrob is receiving approximately 10 billion 500 million mentions every single day, even if that number has decreased to 1 or 2% it would still be an incredible number of mentions for one teenager.

Pay close attention to the meteoric rise in site numbers which reached two million in January 2009, 65 million by July 2010 and then 200 million today, nearly a 150% increase in a one year time period.

Here’s the Infographic: read more

Facebook currently rakes in $2 billion per year which has created a secondary market valuation of $75 billion for the social network or the equivalent of 37.5 years worth of revenue. Facebook however has an advantage over other social media company’s, they are everywhere from major websites to local stores where you can buy Facebook Credits.

So what about other social media companies?  For example, LinkedIn was recently valued at $9 billion, despite earnings of just $200 million per year and an advertising structure that looks less than desirable? Or Twitter who’s own advertising efforts have left the company with just $150 million in revenue per year, yet an evaluation of $7.7 billion at a time when many of their “sponsored Tweets” attempts have shown lower than expected/desired Click Through Rates (CTR’s).

We can also look at Groupon which is valued at nearly $25 billion with yearly earnings of $760 million to see that the valuation of company’s are out of proportion to their values.

Social media site G+, which is made up of sector professionals and academics has posted the following Infographic about social media valuations. They don’t draw conclusions via the Infographic but it’s a real eye opener when you place these online company’s against brick and mortar organizations who have released their own IPO’s.

Here’s the Infographic: read more

Ever wondered how all those ads you see populating the websites and blogs that you frequent get there? Exactly how is the data gathered for all those targeted Google, Yahoo and AOL ads? Below is an infographic of the path of how online ads are generated from the initial data to the target audience.

Another great piece of work from Infographiclabs

Firefox 4 has arrived Tuesday and is boasting amazing download numbers. In its first day FireFox 4′s 7.1 Million downloads beat Internet Explorer’s 2.35 Million. The Mozilla team put together an infographic to celebrate the first 48 hours of Firefox 4 which details the browser’s exact download numbers.

What’s interesting is the perspective of Firefox 4′s downloads over the first 48 hours. The 15.85 cumulative downloads is larger than the population of Los Angeles, California and the Internet in 1995.

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The last 10 years or so have seen online publishing startups such as Mashable and Gawker Media jostle for position with many of the traditional publishers such as the BBC and the New York Times. The team at Infographiclabs created a fantastic visual representation of this in the Infographic below.