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A new study says the need to be entertained may be the biggest driver of activity on the social network

The desire to be entertained predicts the amount of time users spend on Facebook, according to an academic study published this month in the Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media. The study also suggests that the reasons for using Facebook change over time: You sign up for interpersonal communications, but you end up staying for the boredom-busting factors.

Researchers have long known that five broad categories drive online activity: information seeking, interpersonal communication, self-expression, passing time and entertainment.

it’s important to remember that Google still collects all this information whether or not you use Google Now. It’s just that the new service makes it impossible to ignore just how much the company knows about you. So if ignorance is bliss, realizing how much Google knows about you may make a lot of people very unhappy.

Among tablet owners, at least, reading on the mobile Web is preferable to using native apps, according to a recent survey from the Online Publishers Association. 

Forty-one percent of tablet-bound readers prefer reading on the Web, compared to the 30% who would rather launch a standalone app from a specific publisher. Aggregated news-reading apps like Flipboard and Zite rated surprisingly low on the list. 

Last month, Jason Pontin, editor of MIT Technology Review, wrote a widely read takedown of native apps, citing Apple's steep revenue share and the technical and design challenges associated with producing such apps.  "But the real problem with apps was more profound," Pontin wrote. "When people read news and features on electronic media, they expect stories to possess the linky-ness of the Web, but stories in apps didn’t really link."

According to StatCounter global statistics, mobile traffic jumped from about 4% of all Web traffic at the end of 2010 to over 10.5% now.

According to its public statistics, Facebook had "more than 500 million mobile monthly active users as of April 20, 2012." It also claimed "488 million monthly active users who used Facebook mobile products in March 2012."

Facebook's overall monthly active users is 901 million, so that's 55% of Facebook's monthly active user base who access the social network on a mobile device.

80 percent of all B2C and B2B transactions involve some form of word-of mouth-recommendation during the purchase cycle (Forrester: North American Technographics Empowerment Online Survey), then influencing and amping up those conversations is quickly becoming an opportunity that no one can afford to miss.

To Schmidt, today’s smartphones are pocket-size supercomputers. And their core is Android.

1.3 million Android devices come online every day. Nearly 70,000 of them are tablets, an area that Schmidt admitted Android fell behind in relation to the competition (Apple’s iPad, which he did not mention by name). The installed base of Android devices is pushing 500 million, with 480 million active Androids in circulation. It is an ecosystem, Schmidt said, that went beyond anything Google had ever imagined. 

As the number of Internet-enabled consumer devices continues to grow, so does the propensity of consumers to sequentially use multiple devices to complete a single online task. In fact, according to a new study from Google, 90 percent of people move among devices to accomplish a goal.

Examples of how consumers sequentially use multiple devices for a single task include opening an email on a smartphone and then finishing reading it on a home PC and looking up product specs on a laptop after seeing a TV commercial

The other primary way of using multiple devices is simultaneous use, meaning using more than one device at the same time. This includes both multitasking — performing different tasks on different devices — and complementary usage such as looking up a product online while watching a TV commercial.

The Attention Economy paradigm was, in many ways, the fundamental building block for understanding the rise of social media and social networking. This paradigm rested on a simple, but amazingly robust, observation – that the scarce resource in our information overload world was attention.

in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it."

attention is no longer the scarce resource in the world of the mobile Internet - it's location

As much as 40% of clicks on mobile ads are so-called worthless clicks, offering no return on investment for the advertiser, according to a new study.

The study, which was released on Wednesday, was commissioned by Trademob, a Berlin-based mobile app marketing platform. The company analyzed six million mobile advertising clicks on 10 of the biggest mobile advertising networks. Conclusion: Advertisers are wasting a lot of money on mobile ads.

The study, which was released on Wednesday, was commissioned by Trademob, a Berlin-based mobile app marketing platform. The company analyzed six million mobile advertising clicks on 10 of the biggest mobile advertising networks. Conclusion: Advertisers are wasting a lot of money on mobile ads.

thousands of so-called virtual assistants - essentially freelance social marketers - who typically offer clients 1,000 likes for about $25. 

"One thing all of these virtual assistants have in common is a large number of fake profiles that they use,” he said. “The average virtual assistant I've seen who does Facebook marketing has at least five Facebook accounts.”

Such deals have proven irresistible to marketers. “Business owners jump on the chance" to get hundreds of likes, said Jayme Pretzloff, online marketing director for Minneapolis-based Wixon Jewelers, "but they don't realize the repercussions of doing this. Facebook has already cracked down on this by changing its Newsfeed rankings based on engagement." Companies' strong engagement with their fans will appear more often in their fans' feeds, he adds.

Today I searched for “search engine” on Google. The first result was for Wikipedia, then came Dogpile, searchengine.ie, DuckDuckGo, Bing, etc. The Google search engine didn’t appear until the third page of results, which means it might as well be sitting on top of Mount Everest from a search findability perspective.The Google homepage is absolutely atrociously optimized for search engines, but tremendously well optimized for people who search. The Google design is focused on what the customer wants to do, which is to search and find stuff. Google is not focused on getting itself found but on helping customers find.

Yes, it’s important to get found. But what happens after you get found is crucial. From a customer’s point of view, finding a particular website is just the first step in completing a task.

Google wasn’t always popular. Once upon a time it was a totally unknown website run by two students. Its strategy to get found was based on being useful. That’s by far the best philosophy