360angles

This page shows the daily web browsing marketshare for mobile phones of interest, which is calculated from all mobile traffic across the 150,000+ sites that are tracked by getclicky.com. It is updated every 30 minutes.

In the past 10 days the iPhone has been bouncing between 51% and 58% of total mobile web surfing in the US (Outside the US it’s spiked as high as 66%-one third of all non-us mobile devices online are iPhones). I’ve yet to get my hands on a Droid, but I’ve surfed the web with both Palm and Windows Mobile hand-helds and there’s just no comparison to the iPhone in that respect. Honestly, I’m surprised these statistics aren’t even more skewed in the iPhone’s favor.

It’s a group of approximately 500 Twitter users who are “suggested” to new users when they create an account. The stated purpose is to provide people to watch when you’re starting out. But are there other purposes? Could it be used to reward positive coverage and punish negative coverage? I think we now have some data on that.

There’s no doubt that Twitter has received a lot of help from the press, and much of it is genuine enthusiasm for a communication tool that at least hints at the future of news.

Many of the suggested users are news organizations, reporters, columnists, marketers, and as a result, most have over a million followers. Almost all of the top tech news organizations are on the list. And TechCrunch was one of them until something happened in July as is evident in this TwitterCounter graph.

Dave Winer kind of goes on and on about Twitter using their Suggested User List to their own advantage. The smoking gun is that TechCrunch ran some leaked internal eyes-only Twitter documents on their site in July, and were subsequently dropped from the SUL after enjoying a stint on the list for months.

This is a non-story to me. Why would Twitter freely promote someone who knowingly does them harm? Would you? Twitter is not a public servant. They’re a self-interested company.

Anyway, what I thought was really interesting about this post was the chart showing TechCrunch’s meteoric follower acquisition stopped dead in its tracks once they were removed from the SUL. Michael Arrington bit the hand that feeds and got bitten back- it was a hell of a bite.

The 7m figure had actually been rounded up from an actual figure of 6.7m. That 6.7m was gleaned from a 2008 survey of 1,176 net-connected households, 11.6% of which admitted to having used file-sharing software – in other words, only 136 people.

It gets worse. That 11.6% of respondents who admitted to file sharing was adjusted upwards to 16.3% “to reflect the assumption that fewer people admit to file sharing than actually do it.” The report’s author told the BBC that the adjustment “wasn’t just pulled out of thin air” but based on unspecified evidence.

The 6.7m figure was then calculated based on the estimated number of people with internet access in the UK. However, Jupiter research was working on the assumption that there were 40m people online in the UK in 2008, whereas the Government’s own Office of National Statistics claimed there were only 33.9m people online during that year.

And it goes even further than all that; the original study on which this house of cards is built was commissioned by the music trade body(!) BPI from a company called Jupiter Research. (Recently acquired by Forrester Research.) This is the real stink.

Statistically speaking, extrapolating the larger figure from a small sample size is fine (+/- 2% margin of error), but that’s only if the sample was truly random and the questions asked were unbiased. Considering that a music industry lobbying group commissioned the original study and then fudged on the source, that seems doubtful…

An April 2009 survey by The Discover Small Business Watch found that only 38 percent of small businesses with five or fewer employees even have a website. A full 62 percent remain “non adopters.” And that number has decreased only three percent since 2007, when 65 percent of small businesses were not on the web.

Don’t let the “5 employees or less” remark soften the blow of this statistic. According to the U.S. SBA Office of Advocacy, that’s over 3.7 million businesses, or in other words 36% of all US businesses have no online presence.