“Hollywood has the Oscars. Broadway has the Tonys. Now Twitter has the…Shorty Awards”

The New York Times

The Shorty Awards honor the best people and organizations on Twitter. These unique awards are for the Twitter community, by the Twitter community. Online voting is public and democratic, culminating in an awards ceremony that recognizes the winners in 26 official categories as well as those in brand new crowd-sourced ones.

The second annual Shorty Awards nomination process has begun! In January 2010, the community is invited to nominate Twitter users for excellence over the past year. The awards recognize each content creator’s entire body of work, not just an individual tweet. Nominations are made by sending a tweet, whether it’s through this site or on Twitter.

In February, the nominees will be narrowed down to six finalists in each category. Winners will be determined by a combination of popular vote and by the members of the new Real-Time Academy of Short Form Arts & Sciences. An awards ceremony, complete with 140-character acceptance speeches, will be held in March in New York City.

shortyawards.com

According to The Nielsen Company, global* consumers spent more than five and half hours on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter in December 2009, an 82% increase from the same time last year when users were spending just over three hours on social networking sites. In addition, the overall traffic to social networking sites has grown over the last three years.

Globally, social networks and blogs are the most popular online category when ranked by average time spent in December, followed by online games and instant messaging. With 206.9 million unique visitors, Facebook was the No. 1 global social networking destination in December 2009 and 67% of global social media users visited the site during the month. Time on site for Facebook has also been on the rise, with global users spending nearly six hours per month on the site.

blog.nielsen.com

Facebook saw the number of visitors more than double in November 2009 compared to the same month in 2008. The social network had 102.8 million unique visitors in November 2009, making it the largest social network, according to comScore data.

In contrast , the second biggest social network, MySpace, posted a drop in visitors. It had 63.6 million unique visitors in November 2009, down by 16 percent compared to November 2008.

Unique visitors to Twitter soared to 19.4 million during November 2009, an increase of 17.9 million visitors or 1,222 percent compared to the same month in 2008.

www.clickz.com

It was a big year for technology: Twitter and Facebook’s popularity exploded, while new smartphones, e-readers and a host of other gadgets cropped up to compete for our plugged-in affection.

But into each electronic life a little digital rain must fall.

We polled a handful of the most tech-savvy folks we know for their thoughts on the worst moments in technology from 2009 — the most epic “fails” of the year.

And now, in no particular order, our 2009 Tech Fails …

Y2-what? Zune gets off to a bad start

Technically it was a New Year’s Eve surprise. But many owners of Microsoft’s Zune media player started 2009 with little more than a paperweight with LED lights.

At midnight on December 31, all Zune’s 30-GB MP3 players froze up. Microsoft explained the problem as a problem with the way the device’s internal clock recognized (or didn’t recognize) leap years.

The glitch only lasted a day, but didn’t help a device that was already failing to gain ground on Apple’s iPod.

TwitterPeek fails to pique interest

The reaction of many in the tech community to the release of the TwitterPeek device was a collective, “Huh?”

Sure, there are some people who don’t have smartphones and don’t want to pay for expensive mobile plans. But is there really a market for a $199 device that does nothing but let you manage your Twitter feed?

“I already have a $200 device to update Twitter,” said one techie we spoke to. “It’s called my iPhone.”

The folks at Peek, makers of TwitterPeek, had already made the Pronto — a device that handled only texts and e-mails. Maybe a combination of the two gadgets is in the works. But even then, would enough people be interested? Probably not.

Facebook backtracks on owning your stuff

OK … so every time Facebook makes even the most minute changes, it sparks an outcry among its 350 million members, not to mention (irony alert) dozens of new Facebook groups geared at making the site change back.

But a terms-of-service change in February went further, implying that Facebook owned the rights to anything users uploaded to the site. Another change suggested that Facebook held those rights forever, even if people quit the site or took the material down.

Facebook responded that it simply needed those rights to be able to post information to other users. But when the backlash continued, the site eventually switched the terms back to their former wording.

Sidekick punts user info

In what one observer called “an almost incomprehensible data disaster,” T-Mobile told users in October that a server error at a Microsoft subsidiary had lost users‘ personal data it had stored for the devices.

All of it.

Phone numbers, contact lists, calendars and other information was gone — and even new data would disappear if users turned off or recharged the phone.

Users were offered free service and rebates in the wake of the mess, as T-Mobile scrambled to recover what little of the data it could. But that didn’t stop the lawsuits, Internet griping and ill will generated by the snafu.

Hacking Twitter

It started as a story about someone hacking the accounts of several Twitter employees. Then, after Twitter said the attack was limited to personal information, not sensitive, company-related stuff, the hacker behind the attack struck again — in a different way.

He sent 310 documents to leading technology blog TechCrunch. The blog published a small portion of them and sent the documents to Twitter, which is when the company learned that they included financial projections and notes from high-level executive meetings.

Twitter responded by reportedly closing the security holes that allowed the attack.

Enough with the updates, already!

This was the year that online social media exploded. That’s good news for the future of Facebook, Twitter and the like.

But sometimes it just got to be a bit too much.

Members of Congress abandoned any pretense of paying attention to President Obama’s State of the Union speech by updating their Twitter feeds as he was speaking.

There was the groom who updated his Facebook relationship status at the altar. And the women who tweeted during childbirth. [In fairness, the most high-profile tweeting new mom was Sara Williams, wife of Twitter CEO Evan Williams].

And that’s not even mentioning all those friend requests you got from your grade-school teachers and members of your mom’s knitting circle.

Hyped-up Conficker fails

This is a failure we’re glad to report.

The Conficker worm was, by all accounts, a serious bit of malware that infected as many as 10 million computers worldwide. Instead of attacking those computers, it was designed to control them, paving the way for later attacks.

When researchers spotted the date April 1 in the worm’s coding, speculation began mounting that a major April Fools’ Day attack was on its way. Instead, it was mostly quiet — a false alarm of Y2K proportions.

“I think the joke’s on us a little bit, which you would have expected, having an April 1 date,” Holly Stewart, threat response manager for IBM’s X-Force, a computer security service, said at the time.

Attacks cripple Twitter, Facebook

On August 6, the concept of computer addiction didn’t seem so silly.

A massive denial-of-service attack hit Twitter, Facebook and the LiveJournal blogging site. Twitter was by far the hardest hit, completely blacking out for several hours.

The attacks were believed to have targeted a blogger in the country of Georgia who had been critical of Russia. The attacks, the blogger said, coincided with the one-year anniversary of renewed violence between the two countries.

What was telling was how freaked out people became. Users described feeling naked, jittery and upset without the ability to post on Twitter. When the site came back up, the top topic of conversation was the hashtag for “When Twitter Was Down.”

Gmail crashes

We heard some different views on this year’s string of outages or slowdowns of Google’s popular e-mail system.

Some thought coverage was overblown.

But as more computing power moves “into the cloud,” people and businesses are relying on programs like Gmail not just for e-mails, but to archive documents, chat with friends or co-workers and store contact information.

Gmail went through several high-profile crashes in 2009, including one in February and two in September. While e-mail crashes are nothing new to any provider, 2009’s were the first since Google begain offering offline support.

Response to the crashes simultaneously showed how many people depend on Gmail and how easy it is to make fun of those people. Social-networking blog Mashable responded with a list of five things to do while Gmail is down (No. 1: “Immediately flood Twitter with tweets alternately proclaiming, ‘Gmail is down!’ and inquiring, ‘Is Gmail down?’ “)

I got Google Wave — now what?

OK, so it’s a little early in the game to call this one a total fail. But after the breathless anticipation that greeted Google Wave and the hot rush to get an invitation for its beta testing, lots of users found themselves asking, “OK … now what?”

Google, for its part, released an 80-minute tutorial video — leading some observers to argue that if you need an hour and 20 minutes to explain what your product does, you might be in trouble.

It’s designed as a platform to allow users to communicate and collaborate in real time — a tool some predict will be used effectively by developers in the future.

But for now, it’s inspired the creation of a Web site — Easier to Understand Than Wave — on which users compare the online tool to other sometimes obtuse subjects (Both Ozzy Osbourne and the geopolitical climate of Southeast Asia are easier to understand than Wave, users voted, while Sarah Palin and Scientology are both more difficult).

www.cnn.com

With All the Talk of CPMs Going to Zero, Here’s a Survey of Who’s Commanding Top Dollar

Online ad rates, we’re told, are on an express train to zero, helped along by gagillions of impressions generated by Facebook, Twitter and its ilk, and the networks, exchanges and targeting technologies that allow advertisers to buy audience as a commodity, without dealing with individual sites at all.

And while the recession has put another hit on CPMs — the term ad buyers and sellers use as shorthand for the cost for 1,000 impressions — across the web, some sites can still pimp fat ad rates either by virtue of their reach, specialized audience or unique environment.

Who’s getting the best ad rates on the web today? The slideshow that follows, culled from agency buyers and media sellers, is far from scientific, but gives a good sense of who can still charge bank and why.

Here’s who gets the highest online ad rates

adage.com

Eat your heart out H1N1, gatecrashers and Aretha’s hat. According to Global Language Monitor — an algorithms company who used their Predictive Quantities Indicator to find their results — “Twitter” is the most-used word of 2009. (A sampling of runner-ups: Obama, stimulus, outrage, and vampire.)

It’s not really that much of a surprise, considering how many news outlets have consistently referred to Twitter in order to gauge viewer opinions about everything from the Iranian presidential election to Anderson Cooper’s necktie choices. Though, admittedly, it is a bit hard to believe that the leader of the free world was surpassed by a social networking site mostly used to broadcast the amount of Doritos crumbs currently resting on one’s shirt.

Far more entertaining is Global Language Monitor’s list of top phrases of 2009, which is topped, naturally, by “King of Pop.” But when folks weren’t thinking about Michael Jackson, their minds were at the movies: Slumdog Millionaire’s “Jai Ho!” and 2012’s “Mayan Calendar” are on the list as well.

Surprised by these results, PopWatchers? Has “Twitter” dominated your vocabulary? (As an avid LOLcat fan, I would say the word I used most this year is “nom.”) Do you think Twitter will continue its media domination, or fade away next year when the next social networking phenom hits the Interwebs? And see Global Language Monitor’s complete lists after the jump.

Top Words of 2009:

1. Twitter

2. Obama

3. H1N1

4. Stimulus

5. Vampire

6. 2.0

7. Deficit

8. Hadron

9. Healthcare

10. Transparency

11. Outrage

12. Bonus

13. Unemployed

15. Cartel

The Top Phrases of 2009:

1. King of Pop

2. Obama-mania

3. Climate Change

4. Swine Flu

5. Too Large to Fail

6. Cloud Computing

7. Public Option

8. Jai Ho!

9. Mayan Calendar

10. God Particle

The Top Names of 2009:

1. Barack Obama

2. Michael Jackson

3. Mobama

4. Large Hadron Collinder

5. Neda Agha Sultan

6. Nancy Pelosi

7. M. Ahmadinejad

8. Hamid Karzai

9. Rahm Emmanuel

10. Sonia Sotomayor

popwatch.ew.com