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These days, we are deluged with data, and as a result we’re confusing noise with information, and information with useful information. But what many companies fail to realize is that what matters is what you do with that data — and as a result, they are missing out on a tremendous opportunity.

Today at Graphing Social Patterns, executives from hi5, AOL, MySpace and imeem provided updates on their OpenSocial platform usage. Patrick Chanezon from Google opened by explaining that Chinese service OpenPNE out of China and StudiVZ out of Germany are the two newest OpenSocial providers. He also shared some updated stats:

– 19 days in production
– 275 million users
– 66 million installs
– 2,000 applications built on OpenSocial
– 20,000 developers
– 10 million daily app users

AOL

The AOL OpenSocial discussion was brief as the panel was almost out of time but the discussion focused on the third-party and advertising aspects.

imeem

imeem focused on music and showed off some basic OpenSocial goodies you could build on imeem. Apparently you can access the entire music library on imeem using OpenSocial.

MySpace

MySpace came out of the gate boasting how large they are and noted they are twice as large as the nearest competitor (without naming Facebook). The pitch was simple, "want to reach the largest OpenSocial community? Build on MySpace." Staggering stat: 12% of all Internet minutes are spent on MySpace! The MySpace guy wouldn’t answer my question about the costs associated with being a "featured app" - said something about being a developer and not a business guy. I don’t buy it for a minute mister!

hi5

For some reason, the hi5 guy decided to open by putting on a gray shirt - he said that all business people wear blue shirts and khaki pants (luckily he didn’t take his pants off!) - the stunt didn’t seem to get much of a reaction from the audience. It felt like hi5 was the little engine that could from his presentation. They do have very strong adoption of the OpenSocial apps by their community.

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There is no dearth of online personalized news aggregators, the most prominent ones being My Yahoo and start pages like iGoogle which allow you to add different widgets and view customized content in one page. The motive of DailyMe is the same - to deliver you latest content and news from various sources in a […]

comScore is ouit today with a new report regarding U.S. online advertising within the quick-serve restaurants category for March 2008. The report leads with McDonalds online advertising numbers which lead the pack at 295 million online display ads for the month. Quiznos came in second (huh?) followed by KFC, PapaJohns and Subway. In fact, McDonalds nearly tripled the online ad impressions that Quiznos ran.

With the stupid Subway campaigns for $5 footlongs, I would have imagined Subway ranking higher in impressions than Quiznos.

While 295 million impressions might seem like a lot, comScore ranks McDonalds at #113 on their list of total ad impressions for March 2008.

This news comes after TNS Media Intelligence reported that online advertising spend was up 8.5% for the 1st quarter 2008.

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One of my colleagues in the office told me about a website statistics service named Woopra (he knows I love quantitative data). I had not heard about it prior, so I went a did a little research around the Internet about it. Apparently, it launched on/around May 30 2008, as it’s relatively new, but had a nice little writeup on TechCrunch. I did some Tweet tracking and saw that a healthy early adapter audience was using it.

What is Woopra you ask? Very simply: MyBlogLog meets Google Analytics and has a baby, and then morphs into a Bloomberg Terminal of the next century. Very, very interesting, at least to me it is. I’ve taken some screenshots of my Woopra Terminal and put them below for you to see:

What I like about Woopra is that it gives me information in near real-time and tells me where my audience is going and where they have been on my website. Generally, all of the data exists on server logs, but I like the advanced graphical representation of my data. In the screenshots above, you can see the ticker on the bottom of the page that scrolls with data from the server.

Woopra is going to run into some issues when large publishers start signing up. They are in beta right now which is very smart and limiting their service to publishers who are less than 10,000 page views. I’m speculating that the reason for this is because the amount of resources it takes to crunch all of the data is fairly intensive and that they want to work out all of the kinks before they start charing. I’m interested to learn how their infrastructure is built - are they using Amazon’s EC2?

What I’d like to see is Woopra share network data information.  Meaning, if I track a view on my site and rename them, I’d like to see that “renamed” person across the entire Woopra network.  There is a lot of information in the larger “network” - lets see if Woopra pools that data.

I also give them credit for the slick interface.

Darren Herman is a digital media enthusiast and serial entrepreneur. Herman writes about technology, entrepreneurship and digital media at his blog, http://www.darrenherman.com.

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Even if San Francisco’s high-profile, city-wide Wi-Fi network with EarthLink and Google was a fundamental flop, residents of the city that need it the most could still get some free wireless broadband. Meraki Networks, a San Francisco-based startup that makes mesh networking gear is building an ad-hoc San Francisco Wi-Fi network called “Free the Net.” […]

This detailed how-to shows you how to add a floppy drive to a Nintendo Game Boy in order to read endless ROM files for all of the games. Although putting in this much work seems pointless now that you can run a Gameboy and NES emulator on your iPhone, we give mad props to the author who posted everything (including circuit diagrams) for this hack. Check out the details below.

A floppy drive for your Game Boy!

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“Only two lines of javascript and what a difference it makes!” That was my conclusion after trying out NicEdit on my personal blog - a script that puts RichText WYSIWYG functionality into a blog’s comment section.
As any blogger will tell you, the comments section of the blog is pretty much the life-blood of […]

The list of the top software books based on number of Amazon reviews, average Amazon rating, number of Google hits, and Jolt awards.

Startups, unable to bear the brunt of online criminal activity, could start looking to cloud computing — the providers of which have the capacity and infrastructure to survive an attack — for salvation. The clouds, however, are going to have to step up their game.