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Hitwise released research this week reporting that Twitter had a nice relative growth spurt this year. The key word is relative. The site grew from a market share of a whopping 0.0005% (U.S. Internet visits to Twitter.com) to 0.0016% in April. That places the Twitter.com site at number 439 on the list of social networks. I’ll bet if you try to name the 438 social nets above Twitter you’ll run out of gas well before you hit 50.

You’ve got to start somewhere, though, so I don’t quite understand why anyone is either surprised or worried that Twitter is mostly unknown outside of Silicon Valley. It’s a compelling social service and it has every chance to enter the mainstream.

The beginning of Twitter's growth, or the end?

(Credit: Hitwise)

But this post is not really about Twitter. It’s about my favorite topic of late, APIs. The Hitwise analysts recognize that their numbers don’t take into account non-site access to Twitter. Indeed, according to clever ReadWriteWeb research, 44% of all Twitter posts come from sources other than the Web site. They’re from services like Twhirl which rely on the Twitter API, and the IM interface, which when used doesn’t count towards Web utilization. As I’ve said (see How I got burned by Twitter’s API, why it matters, and how to fix it), Twitter has got to get its hack-job of an API converted into a serious platform if the service is to grow into a mainstream app.

Twitter is, I believe, unique among social platforms in its reliance on APIs and non-Web access to its service. But as more Web 2.0 services open up and as developers start to build better interfaces for them (like Viewzi is doing for search engines and AlertThingy does for Friendfeed), the story of Twitter’s multiple access methods will become more typical. And the need for measurement companies to track real service usage will become critical.

I’m already dissatisfied with Internet measurement companies like Comscore and Nielsen/NetRatings, which use incomplete sampling techniques to measure users and pageviews. Neither do they do a good job of taking into consideration users’ interactivity on Ajax-heavy or Flash-based sites, nor do they measure user contribution on individual social sites or blogs (although Avenue A | Razorfish has interesting Web-wide data on social participation).

Ultimately, surveys for measuring traffic are all flawed, or at best incomplete. And I do not buy the common argument that the flaws are the same for each measured site, so you can use the data for comparative purposes at least.

One of the really great things about the online medium, that makes it fundamentally different from broadcast and print, is that you don’t have to perform surveys or polls or browser intercepts to get an idea of who’s doing what, when, or where. You can measure usage at the source. Some company is going to step up to the plate and figure a way to collect this data from site publishers, audit it, and package it in a way that really works. I would place my bets on Google (using Google Analytics as the Trojan horse to gather the data) to be the service that becomes the actual measurement broker for Web 2.0. I really don’t see the current media survey companies becoming more relevant as the Web, and how users interact with it, gets more complex.

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Web analytics and Twitter: An incomplete story

Normally I steer clear of writing about Facebook apps that have been created for promotional purposes, but this one is too good to pass up. It comes from FX UK, which has put together a very strange experience that tells you how “perfect” your face is in order to promote the plastic surgery drama Nip/Tuck.

Users can pick any photos they’ve uploaded to Facebook and simply map out points on their face for the app to run its algorithm. The end result is a 1 percent to 100 percent scoring scale, with 100 being absolute perfection. The entire process takes about a minute from start to finish, and when you’re done, you can see how you stack up with your friends who have used the app, or the general public.

One major flaw with this app from the get-go is that it doesn’t access your profile picture album, which is probably going to be where people have the most recent shots of their face. I also found the zoom to be not quite up to snuff when it comes to letting you line up your face on any picture that hasn’t been taken for a school yearbook. Otherwise, it’s a very enjoyable exercise to claim bragging rights of having the most mathematically perfect face.

Related: FaceStat: What happens when Hot or Not hooks up with Google Analytics

How perfect is your face? Nip/Tuck's Facebook app will let you know.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

See the rest here:
Nip/Tuck Facebook app tells you how ugly you are (with math)

The personal finance Web application Mint is adding investment tracking, making it a more well rounded service for people with moderately complex financial situations, as opposed to people who care solely about cash flow.

(See initial review: Mint: Solid but incomplete online personal finance.)

As it does with cash and credit accounts, the investment feature connects to your online accounts and reads in the data from them. You can get historical data only as far back as your brokerage site will provide it. However, there’s no capability to enter in your historical data (like purchase date and cost) for stocks you’ve owned for years.

As soon as you point Mint at your accounts, you’ll be able to use it to visualize what’s happening in your investments, and in this area, Mint really shines. The Flash-based charting interface shows you either account value or comparative gains and losses by default, instead of stock price charts. It’s a more holistic way to look at investments, and appropriate for Mint’s mission.

Mint shows you how well (or not) your investments are doing.

(Credit: Mint - demo data)

The service also collects data on fees that show up in your stock accounts–important data that most online trading and retirement fund sites don’t go out of their way to highlight.

Silicon Valley denizens waiting to get rich off their prepublic company stocks will find, though, that Mint doesn’t track vesting schedules on stock options. It also doesn’t yet track loans, although CEO Aaron Patzer says tracking for student loans, car loans, and mortgages will be added around June, when the service official ends its beta period.

My grocery expenses compared with other Mint users in San Francisco, who must not have families or houseguests, ever.

Other new features in Mint include deeper comparative data. You can now see how much other people are spending each month in each spending category (such as “groceries”), compared with you. Patzer says Mint’s smart auto-categorizing is a piece of making this work. It doesn’t hurt that most of Americans’ personal spending is debit- or credit-card-based; cash is not automatically categorizable.

In some cases, Mint can get even more specific than categories, and analyze comparative spending per vendor. Mint has over 225,000 users, Patzer says, which yields enough data that it can tell you, for example, how much people like you spend each month at your favorite fast food restaurant.

Quicken users should take note that Mint does not let you actually transact. You can’t pay bills, trade stocks, or do anything else to spend your money. It’s just a tracking service. You have to go elsewhere (banks, brokers) to move your money around. However, as a tool for insight it’s quite good and getting better.

Mint is, and will remain, free. The new features will be rolled out to public beta on May 6, but Webware readers who use Mint can get priority access by visiting www.mint.com/webware after 9:00 a.m. PDT today.

See also: Wesabe, Expensr (just acquired by Strands).

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Mint adds investment tracking, burger buying trends

It’s gossip no more: as rumored, Germany-based social-bookmarking site Mister Wong has acquired the social-media feed aggregator Lifestream.fm for an undisclosed amount. The news was originally reported on digital-media blog Mashable.

Mister Wong previously acquired Websnapr and Pixer.us, which were both created by Lifestream.fm founder Juan Xavier Larea.

Technology from Lifestream will likely be integrated into Mister Wong user profiles so that members can pull in feeds from their social-networking accounts across the Web.

“Mister Wong is 100 percent based on RSS, and we thought that (Lifestream) is a great extension for our user profiles, for example,” Mister Wong spokesman Christian Clawien said in a Wednesday interview with CNET News.com. “With Lifestream, we have the possibility to integrate even more digital activities around these bookmarks, so this could be a very interesting combination.”

For Mister Wong, which Clawien said has greater reach in Germany than Yahoo-owned bookmarking giant Delicious, this was also a way to get a stake in the trendy “lifestreaming” market. “We’ve done this acquisition very quickly, because in Germany, other sites emerging at the moment also take part in this field of ‘lifestreaming’ features,” Clawien explained.

Yup, we’ve got that in the U.S. too.

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Confirmed: Mister Wong acquires Lifestream.fm

If you thought Google’s capacity for high design didn’t go far beyond its primary-colored logo, think again.

The iGoogle personalized home pages have been graced with new flair thanks to the introduction of iGoogle Artist Themes, a way for Google members to do digital interior decoration.

It may not help Mountain View on its quest to organize all the world’s information, but it can make some of that information look a little prettier. Microsoft did something like this with Zune Originals, trendy designs for its music players.

“We’ve collaborated with almost 70 artists from around the world,” an e-mail announcement from Google reads, “inviting them to use iGoogle as their canvas by creating unique, dynamic themes for our users to personalize their pages.” The imagery in each theme changes continually.

Artist Jeff Koons' 'Google doodle'

(Credit: Google)

This is no small-time operation. Google has pulled out the stops, with contributions from artists and architects like Jeff Koons, Michael Graves, Philippe Starck, and Yann Arthus-Betrand, as well as fashion luminaries like Diane von Furstenberg, Tory Burch, Oscar de la Renta, Marc Ecko, and Dolce & Gabbana. A few music artists like Coldplay, the John Butler Trio, and the Beastie Boys also are present, as are pop-culture figures like BoingBoing’s Mark Frauenfelder, Jackie Chan, The Wiggles, and…Lance Armstrong.

To celebrate, Google will host an art-themed party Thursday night at a nightclub in New York’s Meatpacking District, the upscale shopping and nightclub enclave that lies conveniently adjacent to the company’s sprawling Gotham satellite office.

In addition, the Google.com logo has been tweaked by Koons for the day.

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Artsy side of search: Designers, pop stars create iGoogle themes