State of social sharing Summer 2011: people are still on Twitter. Solidly.

With the social media shakeup of recent weeks (G+ is great! LinkedIn is stupid! Klout is for a$$holes!) it’s time we all regroup, take a deep breath, and look at the data.

Mashable’s leaked iPhone 5 pics—sure to be a supertopic among techy, trendy, early-adopting social media peeps, our test audience—have garnered many a share since they came out 1 hour ago. And where are the socialites sharing said hardware porn?

On Twitter, friends. By a dramatic margin—a full 3/4 of shares. Despite Mashable’s sharing bias of highlighting G+.

Here’s that info restated as a hippocampus-friendly pie chart. Most of the pie is blue bird flavoured, and I think this represents the network zeitgeist as to where sharing has the most perceived value/enjoyment.

[Mashable can probably kill Google Buzz now, eh?]

Oversocialized! The social media meta-cliques pick their new BFFs

Image: The New York Post

Here’s what I think. There are some big time alliances going down in the social media stratosphere right now. People are picking sides.

ReadWriteWeb had that trouble the other day with people thinking they were logging in to Facebook when they got ReadWriteWeb as a Google result for “Facebook login”. ReadWriteWeb, in a post immortalizing their own internet-famous moment, blames Google for this.

But how had this happened? It certainly wasn’t that thousands and thousands of people had just started searching for “facebook login” yesterday. This stream of people has been there all along and something is broken.

Google had completely failed its users. It put us, with a post about how an AOL partnership foreshadowed Facebook becoming the de facto user database, above the most logical search result possible – Facebook’s login page.

While for us this was completely random, other search results show that this is actually a space that is otherwise intentionally occupied by sites trying to siphon off this traffic and profit from it.

But does that sound like an accident? This might seem obvious, but Google controls search results. Google’s taking on Facebook head on with Google Buzz. Steve Reubel thinks Facebook might have a crush on Bing, confirming, in my mind, Google and the One Social Network To Rule Them just aren’t that into each other. I betcha Google pretended to think ReadWriteWeb was cute to capitalize on the usual disgruntled user fumbling during a Facebook UI change rollout.

Huh, that’s an interesting idea. What happens when the business that controls the news has to manage news about their business? I know Google’s not evil and all, but if I was the PR guy over there I’d be hanging out around the search guys, um, quite a bit.

So Google hates Facebook, plays ReadWriteWeb to annoy its users. RWW, while flattered at the attention, knows Google is just using them and makes it clear they will never, ever be their date for the prom.

So who is trying to bff the all-seeing GOOG? Read the rest of this entry »