Clearly, however, not anymore.

“Seventy-one percent of consumers say they post hashtags from their mobile devices,” RadiumOne VP Kamal Kaur told me yesterday. “I’ve even caught myself hashtagging in my emails.”

Hashtags help communicate ideas and feelings, the 500-person study says, help Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest users redirect their friends and followers to related content and help unrelated people participate in a larger social conversation. The hashtag was born in strictly geeky circumstances on IRC (Internet Relay Chat, a form of group messaging that arose in 1988) and made its way to Twitter in 2007 with now-Google employee Chris Messina’s tweet:

how do you feel about using # (pound) for groups. As in #barcamp [msg]?

— Chris Messina™ (@chrismessina) August 23, 2007

But with almost three quarters of this study’s respondents — 70 percent of whom were women, and 44 percent of whom were middle-aged — using hashtags, they’re definitely not something that’s confined to young, geeky, and, shall we say it, male culture.

Interestingly, social media users seem to use hashtags much more preferentially on mobile devices than on laptops or desktops, something that may be due to the built-in capabilities for doing so in many social media apps, Kaur said. Of respondents who say they use hashtags, 70.5 percent used them mainly on mobile, and 29.5 percent used them mainly on their desktop device.

Perhaps the reason for the high use is, simply, that they work.

“Fifty percent of respondents said they would explore new content through hashtags,” Kaur said. “People even use hashtags in Facebook, even though you can’t search by them yet there.”

People who see a hashtag tend to click on it, explore it, use it in their own posts, or even check out the person or brand that tweeted it. That’s something that people who want to share their content more widely, including online marketers, should keep in mind.

photo credit: mikecogh via photopin cc

Literally.

That’s the sad reality of app development today, and fewer than half of users who download an app actually use it more than once. Which is precisely the problem that Scringo, an innovative toolkit for developers, is launching to fix. Scringo lets you add features like in-app user messaging, “radar” to let app users know when other app users are near, an app activity feed that can be public, interactive developer feedback, and more, in just two to five minutes.

Oh, and it’s free.

“We’re here to manage three problems for app developers,” Scringo co-founder Ran Avrahamy told me from Tel Aviv. “Reach (or distribution), retention, and revenue.”

Those are pretty much the core challenges for appmakers: getting users, keeping users, and yes, making some cash from users. Avrahamy says, accurately, that there are hundreds of APIs and software development kit focusing on these issues. His goal was to bring together the key needed features in one single SDK.

Source: Scringo

Scringo’s customizable sidebar

Scringo’s SDK is cross-platform for Android and iOS, and integrates into your app in minutes, according to the company. Avrahamy isn’t a developer, and he says he’s integrated Scringo into an app in about five minutes. The fastest he’s seen a developer do it is just over two minutes.

With Scringo integrated into your app, you now have a new totally customizable sidebar that appears and disappears as needed, and contains social login capabilities, the ability for users to share their activity stream while in the app, and the communication functionality mentioned above. Radar helps app users connect with others, if they choose. And the feedback feature includes a “magic rating system,” which, when a user rates the app at five stars, prompts him or her to rate it on the app’s app store.

“The activity stream turns your app into a live dynamic community,” Avrahamy said. “One developer integrated it into a NASCAR app, so users could like cars, drivers, or tracks. Every time a user likes something, it shows up in the activity feed.

Scringo also includes an action button in the activity feed, so if the activity is, perhaps, buying a shirt, others who see it can also buy the T-shirt. Avrahamy calls it “enriching the inner virality of the app.” And a push notifications functionality that helps developers stay in contact with app users, and inform them of important new updates or capabilities.

All of the features are customizable in Scringo’s “Developer Zone,” where WYSIWIG tools control colors, icons styles, included features, and more, and update virtually instantly in the app itself.

Scringo 1.0 was in public beta for eight months, the company says, during which time about a thousand developers signed up and 260 apps actually went live on Google Play and Apple’s app store, ultimately reaching more than a million end users. That eight months of “intensive learning,” Avrahamy says, provided the data that informed what the company built into 2.0, which is its first fully released product.

That data includes how well the SDK helps app developers with their core problems.

“We compared apps before Scringo and after Scringo,” Avrahamy told me. “We saw a 97 percent increase in time spent in apps after integrating Scringo, and an 89 percent increase in recurring sessions.”

In other words, doubling the time, and doubling the uses. Or, as Avrahamy puts it, “we’re giving more reasons for the users to stay, and more reasons to come back.”

Source: Scringo

Scringo adds radar features to your app, optionally.

The big question, of course, is always monetization.

Developers have the option of using the monetization features that are currently built into the SDK, like buying T-shirts. And more monetization options will be coming soon, including a sort of app-store-for-developers inside the company’s developer zone, where developers who create interesting tools can offer them to other interested developers.

Currently, the revshare is 100% developers, 0% Scringo, which sounds like a great deal. Eventually it will likely be the now-standard 70-30 app store split.

The entire offering is very developer-centric and developer-friendly, so much so that Avrahamy calls the company a B-to-D company: business to developer.

“We have a mutual interest,” Avrahamy said, speaking of developers. “What we’re trying to bring is several options of monetization.”

photo credit: Sandeep Somasekharan via photopin cc

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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It was acquired by “another company,” and the Memolane service, which searches and shares your favorite social media content, is shutting down. So the company wrote a blog post announcing that apparently happy fact to the world.

I’m convinced that somewhere there exists a step-by-step guide to writing acquisition-announcing letters that essentially tell users to go away, because companies follow the same formula all the time.

Let’s parse it:

1) We’re awesome, and so are you!

“Here at Memolane, we’ve had an amazing two years helping people see, search, and share all of their social media content from across the web. Our goal was to make it exciting to relive great adventures with friends. We are proud that we could bring joy to people’s lives by sending out daily emails with fun memories from the past. As well, it has been a thrill to share in the excitement when one of our fans rediscovers a precious moment that was once lost.”

2) We have exciting news! It’s awesome, too!

“Today we want to share the exciting news that our team is joining another company that will utilize the Memolane features in an expanded way, adding more value to all the great memories captured on social media.”

3) But, sadly, your account will be deleted … so sorry about that!

“Unfortunately this also means that we will be shutting down the memolane.com service. Your account with Memolane and all its content will be deleted on Friday Feb. 22th 2013. Please note that Memolane only aggregates content so all of your social media memories will still be available on the existing social media services you use.”

4) We know you liked us, but these competitors that sorta kinda do what we did are now your only option. Isn’t that exciting?

“As well, if you love receiving your daily MemoMail, there are other services which you can use, such as Timehop. JoliCloud also offers a service for accessing all your social media. Check it out!”

5) We’re really quite sure we didn’t TOTALLY WASTE THE LAST TWO YEARS OF OUR LIVES here, ’cause that would suck, and be less awesome.

“Since our launch almost three years ago at StartupWeekend CPH 2010, we have seen continued innovation around our vision of rediscovering great memories. With the launch of Facebook Timeline we saw the ultimate validation of our vision.”

6) Need more information? Fine, here you go

“If you are feeling a bit nostalgic then you can read all about how it all started. Also, feel free to send us a message on Twitter or Facebook. Also check out our FAQs post for more information.”

7) Thanks, and goodbye (isn’t it awesome?!?)

“Finally, we would like to share a word of heartfelt thanks with our loyal users, partners and our incredible team. We cannot thank you enough for all of your support, feedback, and warm wishes over the years.

And, as always …

Keep making great memories, thanks for being part of ours!
Eric, Nikolaj and the Memolane Team”

. . .

. . .

I have to say, I’m impressed — the Memolane goodbye post is a classic specimen. Hard to improve on perfection.

photo credit: minifig via photopin cc

As crazy as a pay-for-access social network might sound in the age of Facebook and Twitter, it’s not without precedent. The Well was essentially the first social network, and it was expensive for people to access.

But the key, for Caldwell, is quality.

“I don’t believe that massive numbers of people will adopt something just because it’s good for them,” Caldwell told me yesterday. “To become mainstream, it must become truly better — MySpace was better than Friendster, and Facebook was better than MySpace.”

Not that huge numbers are the goal for App.net. Caldwell’s initial goal for the beholden-to-users-not-advertisers social glue that became App.net was a mere 10,000 users. App.net has already tripled that, and it recently reduced prices from $50 to $36 a year due to economies of scale.

Rather, the goal was freedom.

Freedom for subscribers, who would be the customers and not the product of a social network for perhaps the first time since The Well. And freedom for developers, who would not be at the mercy of a service that owed its capability to meet payroll to advertisers’ capability to make a buck, and therefore to their ability to package and sell users’ attention.

“In my first blog post [about app.net] I said I believed that the social API backends of Twitter and Facebook were really useful to developers, but unfortunately, they’re getting locked down,” Dalton says. “It’s not like the people running the companies are dumb or bad, but they have a business model that forces them to control the stream.”

Which means that that Facebook and Twitter — and any other social network that depends on ad revenue — have a financial incentive to “hose their developers” over and over again. The recent API dustup between Instagram and Twitter that resulted in Instagram photos being banned from the Twitter stream is just one example.

“All the things I’ve been writing about have been coming true,” Caldwell says.

Which is one reason why App.net recently introduced its new file API, which is essentially the building blocks for having your own private cloud without having to own any hardware. With the new API, if a Flickr user wanted to join 500px instead, she could simply import her photos from Flickr and pick up right where she left off at 500px. If — and here’s the massive caveat — both services supported the new API.

That caveat is one reason it makes perfect sense that in conversation, Caldwell still refers to his 6-month-old baby as “an experiment.” It’s a social experiment as much as it is a technological experiment, if not more so. The original idea was to only create a social API backend — a backend for literally almost everything that could be social online — and let developers play with it, build on it, all in a spirit of freedom and openness. User-centricity plus developer-friendly.

“Originally we weren’t even going to have a client ourselves … we didn’t want to build a client for it,” Caldwell said.

Eventually App.net did build a web client, more as a proof of concept than anything else, but Caldwell is more interested in what other developers are doing.

Source: App.net

Patter on App.net

Such as a new client for App.net called Patter which, Caldwell says, looks nothing like microblogging or even Facebook. In fact, it looks like AOL chat rooms, with different topics and rooms you can go into. In other words, nothing like anyone from App.net would have built.

“That’s exactly the point,” Caldwell says. “Stuff that we would never have expected ourselves.”

Whether App.net is a successful experiment or not is still an open question. Early returns are positive, but 30,000 users in a world with billion-user social networks is clearly a blip on the radar. It’ll be interesting to whether that blip is the tip of an iceberg, or just a rowboat tossed in the waves.

App.net, however, has two things going for it.

One is its developing community, who care enough about the service — and what it stands for — to pony up cash for something others think they’re getting for free elsewhere. These are the power users that are spending time on App.net’s fledgling front-end, building relationships and engaging in richer, deeper conversations than they’re finding elsewhere.

The other is that, as sociologist Margaret Mead said, “a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

And Caldwell has a plan for that small, committed group to grow at a much faster rate. But that’s a story for another day.

photo credit: Dunechaser via photopin cc

LinkedIn announced this morning that it has crossed a big threshold: a userbase of 200 million members from all around the world.

The company says its network of professionals come from 200 countries all over the globe and use the site in 19 different languages; more than half of all LinkedIn users live outside the United States.

“It’s been amazing to see how our members have been able to transform their professional lives through LinkedIn,” said the company’s product SVP, Deep Nishar, in a blog post this morning.

“You truly grasp the power of LinkedIn when you start to focus on these individual success stories.”

Granted, these 200 million users might seem paltry next to Facebook’s billion-strong userbase, Twitter’s army of 500 million, and newcomer Google+’s userbase of 500 million registered and 235 million active users. However, LinkedIn has offered and incentivized paid memberships for years — an important feature that accounts for one fifth of the company’s revenue. Once your users are in the hundreds of millions, having them pay for their accounts starts to add up.

The company had its IPO in May 2011. With shares originally priced between $42 and $45, the shares’ value quickly shot up and maintained growth through a dramatic rough patch for tech stocks. Today, shares are trading at $112 as of this writing.

Take a look at this comparison of newer tech stocks over the past year:

Perhaps 200 million isn’t so paltry after all. Here’s a celebratory infographic from LinkedIn:

Image credit: Africa Studio/Shutterstock

User numbers hit a new high, with 955 million worldwide visiting the site at least once a month. And earning are slightly above estimates, coming in at $1.18 billion in revenue and 32 percent year-over-year growth. Over half a billion are coming from mobile devices.

One of the most interesting slides in the company’s quarterly earnings release, however, is this one:

Just two years ago, the United States and Canada made up 30 percent of Facebook’s users. Fast-forward to today, and the percentage is a little bit different: under 20.

Not only has the percentage changed, but the growth rate is almost negligible: only about 35 percent user growth over 24 months for the world’s social utility. That compares to 170 percent growth in Facebook’s “rest-of-the-world” category, which includes Africa, and 165 percent growth in Asia.

Even stodgy old Europe has 63 percent growth.

On the one hand, this is expected and normal. North America has a limited population, about 350 million, of which Facebook has about a 53 percent penetration rate. That’s slightly up from about 50 percent at the end of 2011.

On the other hand … why are those missing 164 million people not on Facebook? It’s a question the company should ponder … particularly because US and European internet users are worth more to advertisers than any others. Internet users are valued at perhaps $1,200 to advertisers, with Facebook making about an annualized $5 as of the first quarter of this year, and Google collecting $20 per user per year.

But not all internet users.

Zambia’s average annual income is $1,600. In the Phillipines, a college professor might make $500 dollars a month. I don’t think Barney’s New York is banging down their doors to sell $5,000 Gucci bags. Not too many iPhones being sold in Cambodia.

The point?

As Facebook’s growth has transitioned largely to the developing world: Asia, Africa, Oceania … the average value to advertisers per user is going down. Just check another slide from the Facebook deck:

The biggest chunk of Facebook users — “rest of world,” at 268 million — accounts for the smallest slice of Facebook’s revenue, $113 million. In fact, if you do that math, you can find the average value to Facebook, per quarter, of each user:

• US/Canada: $3.20
• Europe: $1.43
• Asia: $0.55
• Rest of world: $0.44

The good news is, if this quarter is any indication, Facebook could be bringing in about $12 per US and Canadian user per year. But there’s also bad news … and that’s everywhere else.

Europe can probably be fixed with more time and attention than the US-centric Facebook has given it so far. Starting an office in London may help with that. But Asia? And the rest of the world? Those per-capita incomes aren’t coming up to U.S. standards any time real soon.

And that’s one of the reasons Facebook’s stock is getting hammered.

Image credit: Sergej Khakimullin/ShutterStock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

If you are a struggling artist or developer working on the next great mobile app, you need a strategy for drawing in users.

Keep in mind that buying traffic to convert to users doesn’t always add up. Developing for the mobile platform is vastly different from e-commerce, where the potential average revenue per user (ARPU) is considerably smaller, and in many cases non-existent. At the same time, there’s a limited amount of advertising inventory, and discoverability remains poor.

If you’re considering buying downloads, today’s cost per download (CPD) rates range from $1 to $2, which means it would cost you $10 million to $20 million to buy 10 million to 20 million downloads, which is the current benchmark figure for a successful app.

One way of getting around this is to optimize heavily for organic growth without trying to reinvent the “social graph wheel.” There are already existing, sizable social graphs (like Facebook), and using them will save you time and money

So what’s the trick to get the right kind of growth without breaking the bank? Here are four key tips for taking your app platinum.

Think big

The app you build needs to have huge consumer appeal and real world value. A great example is Onavo. In the face of ever-increasing data charges and operators transitioning to tiered pricing, Onavo takes a unique approach to help customers get the most of their plans. Once installed, the app compresses data to allow users to double or triple their existing data plan. The service claims it can help users save up to 80 percent of their data, which in turn saves them money.

Focus on design and usability

At the end of the day, nothing beats great design and usability. There are over 1 million apps in the iTunes App Store and Android Marketplace for consumers to navigate, so how do you know when your app is ready to test the waters? To stand out you not only need to look great, but have an intuitive user interface (UI) and be responsive. Even the smallest user experience improvements can have an enormous impact on your download figures. Check out Pinterest, the hot virtual pinboard. It has a graphic-intense UI, easy log in procedure, and a great design. With 10 million unique users and a site that drives more traffic than LinkedIn, Twitter, and Google+ combined, it’s a great case study on how to make a product stand out.

Add a social and viral component

Social and viral are two much-touted words, and they are the keys for creating successful mobile applications. What better way to ensure you build up a large user base than to get your users to build it for you? Make it simple for people to invite and share with friends, position your application as a specialty product that allows for self-expression, and be sure to leverage existing social graphs for distribution. For instance, imagine where Instagram would be without the integration of existing social networks. Communication apps are also great examples of this. See Voxer, or my own company Rebtel which has benefited tremendously from over 70 percent of our users coming from referral from current users and word of mouth.

Test your app, iterate on it, and test it again

There’s probably no better way to develop a great app than to listen to your users. At the same time, there has to be a balance, as most of the time, users don’t know what they truly want or need until you show it to them. Product testing and soliciting user feedback can make a good product great, and a great product even better. And don’t be afraid if you need to redesign or re-engineer your product; just be sure to move fast when you do.

The bottom line for any developer is, just like the record industry, you can’t buy platinum hit on mobile. So build something with real value, with a great user interface and user experience, and something that proves that the more people use it, the more valuable it becomes.

Lastly, make it easy to share and (if possible) a part of that users’ everyday life. You also need listen to your users and iterate fast, or another product can swiftly gain traction on you. If you do all these things then you have a chance to succeed.

Remember, securing a smash hit on mobile can be hard, but with a great team, some help from smart PR pros, and a little dash of the X-factor sprinkled in, you’ll be more than ready to satisfy even the toughest of critics.

Andreas Bernstrom is the CEO at Rebtel, the largest mobile VoIP provider after Skype (based on revenue). Prior to Rebtel, the Goldman Sachs alum was COO of Taptu, a leading UK-based mobile search engine, and TradeDoubler, Europe’s leading performance based marketing company.

VentureBeat is holding its second annual Mobile Summit this April 2-3 in Sausalito, Calif. The invitation-only event will debate the five key business and technology challenges facing the mobile industry today, and participants — 180 mobile executives, investors, and policymakers — will develop concrete, actionable solutions that will shape the future of the mobile industry. You can find out more at our Mobile Summit site.

User growth image via ShutterStock

Facebook has yet to make a statement on the current number of total users. Some speculate that the company is holding off an official announcement until reaching a billion users, but it’s just as likely that Facebook is still waiting to achieve the 750 million mark.

The last time the company made an official announcement about its user base was in July 2010 when it reached 500 million per month for the first time since being founded in 2004.

Facebook’s monthly user base was unofficially reported as being over 600 million in January 2011, according to a leaked document from Goldman Sachs intended for potential Facebook investors.

If both the TechCrunch report and the Goldman Sachs document are accurate, Facebook’s user base is growing at an estimated rate of nearly 150 million users every six months.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Evernote, a note-taking and reminder app that works across computers, phones, and mobile devices, said today that users of Apple devices are more valuable to the company than non-Apple users.

The comments, from Evernote chief executive Phil Libin today, confirm what many are already seeing in the mobile industry.

Libin said that iOS was its leading platform for overall revenue, accounting for 28 percent. iOS also topped all other platforms when it came to total amount of users gained per Evernote developer working on the platform. It also led in total revenue earned per developer. Evernote, in the end, is a compelling case for success on Apple’s iOS app store.

Desktop Mac users also stuck with the service more than any other platform’s users , and they also generated more user and revenue growth than their Windows counterparts. Libin said he wasn’t sure why Apple users end up being more comfortable paying for a service, but obviously it’s an important figure to note. In a ranking of overall user value, Libin notes that iOS and Mac rank first and second respectively, while Android ranks third.

Libin made the comments on stage this evening at VentureBeat’s Mobile Summit. And the value of Apple users was just one of four main points in his presentation about Evernote’s massive success.

The company’s software lets users save notes — anything from text, images, photos, or files — on their computers and mobile devices, which are then synchronized to cloud servers and subsequently accessible on any web-connected device. Users can also subscribe to premium features, including larger file upload capabilities,for $5 a month or $45 a year.

Evernote has long said that its users become more valuable over time, so it’s no surprise that the first major point Libin jumped to was the company’s most valuable users. He also discussed some new analysis around Evernote’s “cohort” user classification, which is a method the company uses to group together users by the month they first started using Evernote. After first joining the service, most users don’t return, but those select few who do end up generating tons of revenue.

The March 2008 cohort, for example, consisted of 31,334 users. By June 2008, only 11,000 of those users remained, and the company earned a measly $700 from them in that month. But by January 2011, those users ended up contributing over $10,000 in a month. That’s because users find Evernote more valuable the longer they use it, which leads them to subscribe to premium features.

Libin mentioned that this sort of service — one that becomes more useful over time — wouldn’t be possible without cloud-based infrastructure. Consumers are more used to services that become less valuable over time, or those, like a newspaper, that have sustained value.

Libin then went on to point out data that showed how native application users are far more valuable to Evernote than web users (the company’s top revenue came from its iOS, Windows, and Mac applications). Additionally, he said that we shouldn’t discount desktop applications — the Windows application generated 24 percent of the company’s overall revenue, while the Mac application accounted for 20 percent.

So to recap, here are Libin’s four major conclusions from his presentation:

1) The longer users stay, the more valuable they get.
2) Native users are more valuable than web users
3) Apple users are more valuable than non-Apple users.
4) Don’t underestimate desktop apps.

VentureBeat will be exploring more mobile themes at our MobileBeat 2011 conference in July.

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Scvngr, the maker of a check-in app that asks users to complete activity challenges, is defying the conventional wisdom that services which broadcast one’s location to friends aren’t ready for the mainstream. Just yesterday, the app has reached 1 million users, founder and chief executive Seth Priebatsch tells VentureBeat, and added nearly 10,000 new users since then.

If it sustains that pace, Scvngr could quadruple its user base in a year.

Recent studies have suggested that some users of check-in services drop out after a period of experimentation, a phenomenon known as “check-in fatigue.” Scvngr differentiates itself from other location services by adding activities and challenges to the mix. The idea is that this added layer may counter users’ ennui with just sharing their location with friends.

Scvngr may be benefitting, too, from larger services that are popularizing the idea of the check-in. Facebook doesn’t give out user numbers, but notes that its Places check-in feature is available to more than 150 million mobile users. And popular app Foursquare has almost reached 7 million registered users to date. That company reached its own millionth-user milestone almost a year ago in April 2010.

These services are finding a bunch of ways to add users, including most recently getting themselves preloaded on smartphones. Foursquare partnered with Japanese telecommunications company KDDI to give users a shortcut for downloading the mobile application on several of its Android smartphones. Scvngr also announced that its app will appear on Virgin Mobile’s new pre-paid Android device. Loopt, another location service, is also available on several MetroPCS smartphones, including the LG Optimus M, Huawei Ascend and BlackBerry Curve 8530. Loopt, an early location app, got a big boost through a deal with Sprint, the wireless carrier.

Boston-based Scvngr, founded in 2008, previously raised a second round of funding of $15 million as well as a first round of $4 million, bringing the total funding to around $20 million.