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Pinners are more active on tablets whereas tweeters flock to smartphones. Consumers also show different sharing behaviors depending on the operating system. Android users are more active on Facebook, whereas iOS users are more active on Pinterest and Twitter.

Facebook is the place to share about politics and parenting, Twitter tends to be all about business and sports, and Pinterest leans heavily toward shopping.

Pinterest and Twitter are still gaining – together, they stole just over 2% of Facebook’s share of social activity last quarter

“Twitter ads…generate clicks at a much higher rate as advertisers integrate them tightly with broad trends and conversations, serving up straightforward messaging and content directly into relevant conversation streams.”

when a user gives Facebook a phone number for two-factor authentication or in order to receive alerts about new log-ins to a user’s account, that phone number became targetable by an advertiser within a couple of weeks

I’ve been trying to get Facebook to disclose shadow contact information to users for almost a year now. But it has even refused to disclose these shadow details to users in Europe, where privacy law is stronger and explicitly requires companies to tell users what data it has on them.

To test the shadow information finding, the researchers tried a real-world test. They uploaded a list of hundreds of landline numbers from Northeastern University. These are numbers that people who work for Northeastern are unlikely to have added to their accounts, though it’s very likely that the numbers would be in the address books of people who know them and who might have uploaded them to Facebook in order to “find friends.” The researchers found that many of these numbers could be targeted with ads, and when they ran an ad campaign, the ad turned up in the Facebook news feed of Mislove, whose landline had been included in the file; I confirmed this with my own test targeting his landline number.

“I think that many users don’t fully understand how ad targeting works today: that advertisers can literally specify exactly which users should see their ads by uploading the users’ email addresses, phone numbers, names+dates of birth, etc,” said Mislove. “In describing this work to colleagues, many computer scientists were surprised by this, and were even more surprised to learn that not only Facebook, but also Google, Pinterest, and Twitter all offer related services. Thus, we think there is a significant need to educate users about how exactly targeted advertising on such platforms works today.”

There are certainly creepier practices happening in the advertising industry, but it’s troubling this is happening at Facebook because of its representations about letting you control your ad experience. It’s disturbing that Facebook is reducing the privacy of people who want their accounts to be more secure by using the information they provide for that purpose to data-mine them for ads.

When I asked the company last year about whether it used shadow contact information for ads, it gave me inaccurate information, and it hadn’t made the practice clear in its extensive messaging to users about ads

What Google Authorship also does is help rank that author in search for original content all over the Interwebz. Can you say guest posting anyone? How about blogging communities? (Just so you know, The SMB Collective is accepting new bloggers; it’s a blogging community I established in 2010 that is ebbing out of dormancy.)