Laughter and applause greet a dig at the iPhone on Saturday Night Live

SNL's Seth Meyers. Image: NBC

You know you've got a public relations problem when you're a punchline on SNL's Weekend Update.

The host, Seth Meyers, doesn't make a lot of Google (GOOG), Apple (AAPL) and AT&T (T) jokes, but this one worked.

"It was reported this week that Google would soon launch its own cellphone as a challenge to the iPhone. Also a challenge to the iPhone? Making phone calls."

The audience — presumably the usual mix of tourists and enough reception-challenged New Yorkers to appreciate the humor — laughed and applauded.

Video clip below the fold.

UPDATE: The clip has been removed from YouTube by NBC Universal. But you can watch the whole episode below or on hulu.com. The joke begins at 37:20.

[Follow Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Twitter @philiped]

By 35% a month lately, according to the ad requests pouring into AdMob's network

Click to enlarge. Other includes HTC Desire, Samsung Moment, Samsung Galaxy and HTC Tatoo. Source: AdMob.

"Traffic from Android devices has increased dramatically over the last year," according to a report issued Friday morning by AdMob, the world's largest purveyor of mobile ads.

In November alone, Android devices accounted for 27% of the hits on AdMob's U.S. ad network, up from 20% in October — a 35% increase in one month.

Of course, AdMob is counting ad requests, not handset sales, so its numbers cannot be used to measure market share in the traditional sense. But its reports do provide a monthly snapshot of where the rapidly expanding smartphone market is headed. The growth in Android traffic — fueled by the release of new Android-powered devices — is one of the featured themes of AdMob's November report.

Among its Android-related findings:

• Six months ago a single Android device, the HTC Dream (G1), generated 92% of Android traffic, while in November 2009 the G1 accounted for only 37% of requests.
• The Motorola Droid, HTC Magic and HTC Hero generated 22%, 21% and 9% of Android requests worldwide in November 2009, respectively.
• In November, 88% of Android traffic in the AdMob network was generated in the U.S. The U.K. was with second largest market with 4% of requests.
• In the U.S., the Motorola (MOT) Droid quickly became the No. 2 Android handset, thanks in part to heavy marketing by Verizon (VZ). In the U.K., the HTC Dream, HTC Magic, and HTC Hero make up 92% of Android requests.

AdMob was acquired by Google (GOOG) in November for $750 million shortly after Apple (AAPL) had reportedly expressed interest in buying its network. You can download its November report as a pdf from metrics.admob.com.

See also:

• Where in the world are Apple's 78 million handsets?
• The smartphone wars, one year later

[Follow Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Twitter @philiped]

The Beautiful Life will air five episodes on YouTube – and if it's popular enough, it could live on. Photo: Jan Thijs / The CW.

We know that the Internet can build a TV show’s buzz, and sometimes even keep it from getting canceled. But can it bring one back from the dead?

We’ll soon find out: A recently canceled show has come to YouTube.

The Beautiful Life, a drama about the New York modeling scene, met a swift end on the CW early this season. The show had the misfortune of going head-to-head with Glee, the Golden Globe-nominated breakout hit on Fox, which competes for the same young demographic. After managing just 1.4 million viewers for its first episode and 1.1 million for its second, the CW gave The Beautiful Life the ax.

But here’s the twist: One of the show’s producers is Ashton Kutcher, a.k.a. the most popular guy on Twitter. (He has 4.1 million followers.)

Kutcher is determined to bring the show back. It helps that he’s more connected than the average producer, and those connections have given The Beautiful Life another shot at, well, life. With some funding from Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) and distribution help from YouTube (GOOG), Kutcher’s Katalyst Media plans to post a total of five episodes of The Beautiful Life online and keep them there for six months. (Three episodes are up already, with two more coming next week.) If the show draws enough engaged viewers, it could live on – either as an online-only show or back on TV.

“We spend months if not years on a product. We put it out on the television, we let the viewers vote, we get our ratings. If it doesn’t work, we throw it away and start over with something completely different as opposed to tinkering and tweaking and changing the program,” Karey Burke, head of television for Katalyst, told FORTUNE. “What’s exciting is to think about taking a program like this that has a very short shelf life and giving a chance for the brand to live.”

Why did HP underwrite the project? Larry Nelson, HP’s director of digital strategy, said the non-traditional approach is a good fit with HP’s technology brand – and HP is already spending half of its marketing budget on digital. It helped that HP was launching its “Create Change” program that allows shoppers to donate 4% of the purchase price to a charity when they buy directly from HP.com – The Beautiful Life offers HP a chance to see whether it can get fans of a broadcast-quality online show to buy HP products, visit HP websites and generally engage with the HP brand.

If HP can figure out how to make all that happen, it’ll be a beautiful thing.

Can media companies thrive online by reaching the right people at the right time?

By Ramana Rao, Co-founder and CEO, iCurrent

Rao sees opportunity in tracking online readers' interests. Photo: iCurrent

Amid the sturm and drang of traditional publishers squaring off against Google (GOOG) and others in a game of high-stakes business, it’s easy to lose sight of the opportunity the Internet offers for a much more satisfying news and information experience.    Although resolving new models for content production and distribution is important,  the even bigger story will ultimately be about how the industry produces new experiences that are more personally relevant while retaining many of the values we so appreciate in traditional media.

This story requires a new lens.  In his influential 2006 book, The Long Tail, Chris Anderson paints the picture of how the Internet is turning us “from a mass market back into a niche nation, defined now not by our geography but by interests.”   Yet the book doesn’t quite explain the elusive concept of interests and this is critical to understanding what’s ahead.

What are interests?

We could just say interests are what we’re interested in, but that’s simplistic.  An interest is a commitment to give attention to something and that this commitment flows in time – deepening or drying up, widening or narrowing, or changing its route altogether.  Interests live in our heads, hearts, and hands and are what create a demand for information.

Consider a typical palate of interests.  You may be interested in astronomy generally and the Mars Rover specifically.   You may be interested in places you’ve lived or causes you care about.   You may attend for a while to a world disaster or each year to the World Series, or continually to professional interests like regulation of markets or technology-fueled transformation of culture.

Your interests have natural boundaries you understand, e.g. Bill Gates in the context of philanthropy, or the iPhone in the enterprise, or Facebook as you raise teenagers.

These examples together illustrate that interests are dynamic flows on the demand side, in contrast to the supply-side concepts of The Long Tail’s expanding inventories of items such as books, songs, and movies.

From "items" to "flows"

Our interests create demands for information flows.  The publishing and information industries, as opposed to the hit-making entertainment or the hard goods retail industries, have long served this much more subtle proposition.   Rather than seeing the actual product as items, they essentially package flows and build value and loyalty through their responsiveness to their audience across time.

“Periodicals,” as they’re called, filter and organize streams of items.  Consider the daily newspaper, the Sunday paper, and monthly magazine and how well they have fit in our lives for many years.  Add radio news programs as we commute, TV as we cook, and now content streams to us from all directions.

The people producing newspapers, magazines, and programs have always considered the audience—you had to in an age when you couldn’t so easily fail small.  And there has long been pressure on decreasing costs and meeting underserved interests—over time lower circulation projects were not just viable but launched with much less risk and achieved much greater profits.  Technology and new practices have fueled a steady tightening of the interactive loop between publisher and audience and thus a qualitative shift toward being less pushy and more responsive.

From push to pull

The Internet is the latest disrupting technology and it is the most powerful.  Not only for the reason that is well underway—the proliferation of content creators and outlets—but more importantly because as the ultimate interactive media it enables the true flip from supply push to demand pull.

We can view this as a different long tail, a long tail of interests.  The “items” on the x-axis of this new long tail are flows that match the interests of their consumers.  The crest of the curve would include traditional newspapers and radio stations that persist.  And out along the tail would be interest-based flows that might have audiences of one, some that flash and pop, some that stay unique and stable for long periods.

The industry is just now igniting on the possibility of serving the long tail of interests.   In the entertainment industry, Pandora — a personalized music-streaming service — produces such flows in the form of its stations for each unique listener.  You start out with a generic station based on genre, artist, or song and then through “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” reactions to songs that are played, you tune the station.    In our own effort at iCurrent, we have pursued a similar approach to serve interest-based flows of information based on direct user signals.

Our pursuit has attuned us to two major challenges for personalized information delivery.

First, with information experiences, much more so than with entertainment experiences, there are a rich and subtle set of factors that we are all directly aware of that determine whether or not something meets our needs and interests.  Characterizing interests upfront may seem challenging, but it is quite easy to know that something is or isn’t of interest as you see it.

Second, greater personal relevance doesn’t mean we want to throw out what traditional media serves so well.    Personalized does not mean isolated nor self-created.   Along with new sophisticated search and filtering technologies that match against our interests, we want the value added by the work of others.

Very likely the information industry will stabilize in the next few years on new business models for content creation.  The pursuit of achieving holistic experiences and business models around interest-based flows will last longer especially as the mobile Internet is integrated into the picture.  Though interests and experiences may be confounding and harder to sell than, say, books or products, in the end, those that understand them will be the ones that make the future.

Rao is co-founder and CEO of iCurrent, an online personalized news service based in South San Francisco, Calif.

Sorry, Google. The apps (and by that we mean appetizers) won out.

At long last there is proof of Google’s (GOOG)  long-anticipated smartphone. Late last week, the online advertising giant started handing out an Android-powered phone to employees. While refusing to detail the specs, the official Google mobile blog refers to it as a “mobile lab.”

The Googley vagueness continues on the blog, where it is described as, “A device that combines innovative hardware from a partner with software that runs on Android to experiment with new mobile features and capabilities.”

Of course, the gadget-obsessed immediately ran to the Federal Communications Commission to get those specs, and photos have been popping up all over. So, we now (mostly) know that it is a sleek-looking touch-screen phone made by HTC, powered by a high-end Qualcomm (QCOM) processor and featuring the latest Android 2.1 OS. From the looks of things, this GSM phone could operate on any number of networks abroad, but seems destined at least for T-Mobile in the United States.

With all the Googlers eager to show off their new gizmos, and this, the calendric peak of the holiday party season, it was inevitable that in the Bay Area at least, the two would combine.  Sure enough, a friend attending a holiday party over the weekend in San Francisco with a number of Google folks making merry was presented with the new phone. “Mostly, I wanted to see the photo of the engagement ring that was on it,” she says, requesting anonymity. “It wasn’t an iPhone, and besides, there were pigs-in-a-blanket and these really good mini-cheeseburgers, and I was hungry, so I didn’t pay too much attention. “ So there you have it.

Table stakes: iPhone quality hardware

Discounting for a moment that this occurred in gadget-jaded Silicon Valley (and that the mini-cheeseburgers were really good), it does offer a point worth examining. Great hardware is the minimum starting point in the smartphone market these days, and it doesn’t get anyone’s blood racing by itself. As a piece of hardware, the Google phone, dubbed the Nexus One according to employees, had better be on par with an iPhone. If not, as we have seen time and again with would-be competitors, it will be a non-starter.

Let’s assume Google’s phone is tip-top in the hardware department. What sells smartphones these days has as much to do with the software running the phone and the applications available as the hardware. Again, Apple (AAPL) leads the pack by a wide margin with its mobile apps store.

Google’s open-source mobile OS Android has been getting mostly good reviews, especially in its latest incarnation running on Motorola’s (MOT) Droid phone. What Google needs to do, however, is get more Android phones out there to attract more developers and get the critical application mass it needs.

What has everyone most excited at the moment is the (rumored) prospect that Google will sell its Nexus One as an unlocked, carrier-agnostic piece of gear starting in January. Fine, as long as the phone is still relatively cheap. If Google comes out with a $500 unlocked phone, it will fade as quickly as all of Nokia’s similar unlocked and pricey efforts.

But if Google sells its phone contract-free for the same $199 the iPhone sells for (with a two-year AT&T (T) contract) it will have a monster on its hands. How could that happen? Google, rather than a carrier could subsidize the phone, and make up the cost via mobile advertising (it just bought AdMob), or maybe just take a hit to build a market. Google can certainly afford it. Either way, Android gets very huge, very fast, and that is what Google really wants.

Would that upset Google’s roster of current Android customers, including Motorola, Samsung and some of the wireless carriers? Sure it would, but this isn’t about the old-school wireless ecosystem, it’s about the mobile Web and Google’s designs to own it. If Google wants it, it needs to step up. If not? Those pigs-in-a-blanket sure look good.

The long-rumored gPhone has surfaced, but no one can agree on what it means

The purported Google phone. Photo: Cory O'Brien

Google (GOOG) announced on its mobile blog Saturday what dozens of staffers had already leaked: the company has given employees around the world free handsets running its Android mobile operating system. The idea, according to the official report, is to have Google's own people test various advanced features and offer feedback to the company's designers — a process known in the business as "dogfooding" (as in "eating your own dogfood").

Not surprisingly, given Google's financial clout and the power it wields over the Internet, the experiment has launched a storm of speculation about what it means. As we sort through the theories, we count at least nine ways of looking at the Google phone:

1. Google is in the process of designing an unlocked cellphone that it plans to sell directly to the public online — bypassing the mobile carriers and brick-and-mortar retailers — sometime next year. This is the line TechCrunch took first and the Wall Street Journal has picked up, citing unnamed sources "familiar with the matter."  This theory underlies much of the theorizing that follows.
2. Google has watched with dismay as smartphone makers tweak the Android OS to suit their needs, fragmenting the software ecosystem and scaring off developers. "By putting its stake in the ground," writes GigaOm's Om Malik, "the company is hoping that it doesn’t make the mistake that Microsoft made by dragging its feet in releasing Zune and ceding the market to Apple’s iPod."
3. Apple (AAPL) has finally met its match in a competitor that has the resources, the partners and the staying power to challenge the iPhone. This, finally, is the real iPhone killer.
4. The iPhone, despite the failure of AT&T's (T) network to keep up with bandwidth demands in high-profile urban markets, continues to sell like crazy. Google realizes it has to move fast or the game will be lost.
5. A Google phone sold without a subsidy from the mobile carriers would be prohibitively expensive — at least $400, and probably more like $500 or $600, according to Ian Betteridge's back of the envelope calculations. (See his comments here.) A carrier like T-Mobile (DT) could sell the same phone for a fraction of the price.
6. Google could subsidize the phone out of its own pocket, perhaps giving it away for free to drive more traffic to its revenue-producing ads — a strategy that's worked for nearly every other project in Google Labs.
7. If Google were to try to sell a smartphone below cost, the company would be facing a 21st century version of the Microsoft (MSFT) antitrust trials, and the start of a long, slow decline.
8. Google is about to alienate the very hardware manufacturers it's counting on to carry the Android flag. Why would customers buy a Motorola (MOT) Droid, for example, when they could get the official Android smartphone from Google?
9. Google has no intention of making its own hardware. The so-called Google phone is actually  the HTC Passion (AKA Bravo), an Android 2.1 smartphone set for U.S. release by T-Mobile in January. The "dogfooding" exercise is exactly what Google said it was — a way to test a bunch of advanced Android features on a friendly user base before they go public.

[Follow Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Twitter @philiped]

The newest trend in e-commerce: Social media meets local networking.

Social commerce site Groupon offers daily deals to nearly two million subscribers in 27 U.S. cities.

When David Morton, owner of the Pompei chain in Chicago, signed up with an Internet startup to offer a coupon online, he expected to sell a few thousand at most. Instead, during the 24 hours the coupon was posted on November 22, more than 9,000 local consumers purchased an offer that got them $10 worth of pizza for $5.

The coupon was an all-time sales record for Chicago-based Groupon, a hot startup that brings the buying power of the masses to the social web. After launching with local merchants in its hometown one year ago, Groupon today offers deals to nearly two million users in 27 cities in the U.S. including New York, Charlotte and Austin.

Here’s how it works: Groupon sends a daily email to subscribers with a deal, or “Groupon,” for a local business or event, like a salon, restaurant, class or concert. If they want in, users then sign on to Groupon’s site to pay by credit card and have a year to redeem the coupon.

Before “the deal is on,” however, a minimum number of users must agree to buy. This spurs buyers to post the deal to social networks like Facebook and Twitter (or go the old-fashioned route: email) so the quota will be met. Many of Groupon’s offerings also tend to be social in nature, like attending a class or an event or checking out a new restaurant, making them ideal for rallying Facebook friends.

“Groupon layers nicely on top of the social graph that’s developed over the last few years,” says Groupon CEO Andrew Mason.

The site shows nearly one million Groupons sold, claiming to have saved users over $42 million. The company, which takes a cut of the deals it sells, is profitable and predicts revenue of $100 million over the next 12 months.

Investors get their Groupon

These numbers caught the eye of exalted venture capital firm Accel Partners, which led a $30 million investment round with New Enterprise Associates, announced last week. The infusion will go towards hiring, investing in technology, growing the customer base and expanding geographically.

Accel, an investor in Facebook, doesn’t need to be convinced of the social web’s potential: Another portfolio company, Playfish (it makes "social games" for Facebook and other social media platforms) last month sold to Electronic Arts (ERTS) for $400 million.

“We’re in the middle of another transition, of search to the social web,” says Accel’s Kevin Efrusy. “Just as Google [through its search business] enabled a whole new crop of businesses, the social web is enabling a lot of things that just weren’t possible before.”

Groupon’s model is appealing to investors in part because of is its operational efficiency. There is no need for inventory or shipping–users simply print the Groupon and take it to the vendor. And unlike other group buying sites, because most of the offers are services or experiences, there’s a nearly unlimited supply. (Some offers do need to be capped though, as Mason experienced when the company sold 4,000 Groupons for a nail salon with only two technicians, which was booked solid for months after).

Groupon might not the best idea for impulse buyers on a budget. But much of what the site offers are things you might do anyway: get a haircut, go out to eat, attend a sports events. And Groupon claims a high threshold of quality. “We knew that if we did bottom of the barrel, that would be self-fulfilling, we would be bargain basement, cheap stuff site,” says Mason, referencing past Groupons for James Beard award winning-restaurants and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Word-of-mouth, Facebook-style

For all Groupon’s promise and buzz, it’s still early days for the space and not everyone is convinced. Forrester analyst Nate Elliott points out that buying clubs and word of mouth marketing have been around for years. “Look at Avon, Tupperware, Amway—these are five to ten billion dollar companies. Marketers have long understood the power of influence marketing.”

But Groupon's advantage seems to be its ability to harness the power of local communities online. “Groupon really cracked the code because they realized it was about local business,” explains Efrusy. “Local has been difficult to make money on since beginning of the Internet. How do you find out about yoga, a hair salon, a spa? Word of mouth.”

In addition to being an untapped source of ad revenue, local businesses are an attractive target for Groupon because they are highly relevant to users, who enjoy discovering new places and events in their hometowns.  This also helps create the perception that Groupon's deals are more about content and information, rather than advertising.

“We’ve been a Chicago institution for 100 years, but we thought this was a way to reach new customers,” says Pompei owner Morton. “It’s much more powerful and direct than traditional media.”

An analyst describes the smartphone innovations he expects from Apple in 2010

Photo: Apple Inc.

In a note to clients issued Wednesday, Piper Jaffray's Gene Munster suggests three ways Apple (AAPL) can stay ahead of the coming wave of smartphones powered by Google's (GOOG) Android OS.

• Build an iPhone for Verizon. Munster continues to believe there's a 70% chance Verizon (VZ) will get an iPhone before the end of 2010. The value of more than doubling the phone's addressable market — i.e. adding Verizon's 89 million U.S. subscribers to AT&T's (T) 82 million — would more than justify the cost of manufacturing a CDMA iPhone, according to Munster.
• Give the iPhone a battery that lasts longer than one day. "Apple has introduced advanced battery technology with its portable Macs," he writes, "and we expect the company to dramatically improve the iPhone battery life with the next several hardware launches."
• Turn the iPhone into a digital wallet. Munster predicts that future iPhones will have built-in RFID (radio-frequency identification) technology, allowing them to make retail payments with a single swipe.

"We've just scratched the surface" in terms of apps and accessories, says Munster, who has an interesting take on Apple's continued resistance to Adobe (ADBE) Flash. He sees it as a slightly Machiavellian move with strategic implications.

"Apple has built a moat around their apps," he writes, "in part by excluding Flash, preventing app developers from building apps in Flash and porting them to all mobile platforms."

UPDATE: On Twitter late Thursday, Eldar Murtazin, the Moscow-based editor of Mobile Review, posted this cryptic note: "Foxconn received order for next generation iphone." Foxconn is the trade name of Hon Hai Precision Industries, which manufacturers most of Apple's products.

[Follow Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Twitter @philiped]

Seagate's Pulsar drive uses single-level cell NAND flash, and is the first of what analysts expect will be many solid-state products from the storage giant. Image: Seagate.

Flash memory – the stuff that stores data in consumer gadgets like phones and digital cameras – is also finding its way into more corporate data centers. It turns out that while flash is still far more expensive than trusty old hard drives, it uses less power and serves up information quickly. That makes it well suited for tasks like data mining, business information and any other situation where time is money.

That’s why Seagate (STX), the world’s largest manufacturer of hard drives, is getting into the flash game. Seagate today is expected to unveil Pulsar, a new flash-based storage product that looks like a hard drive and holds up to 200 gigabytes of data. The drive is designed for a mainstream server – the kind that handles e-mail and basic databases – and is the first of many flash-based products Seagate hopes to release soon.

Seagate has one big advantage as it breaks into the enterprise flash market: it’s already the big dog in data center hard drives, selling to the likes of Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT) and EMC (EMC). Because Seagate’s sales folks know how businesses buy storage, they’ll be able to quickly muscle their way to the front of the flash supplier line.

But there are also challenges. For one, smaller companies like Fusion-io have been selling enterprise flash drives for quite a while – and from what I’ve heard, some of them arguably have edgier technology based on the SAS and PCI interfaces. After my chat with Seagate sales exec Dave Mosely, I asked Gartner storage analyst Joe Unsworth for his take on Pulsar.

“The Seagate drive is a decent start considering that they are indeed late to the game,” Unsworth wrote in an email. “However, the product itself does not differentiate itself compared to what is out there – after all, it is really only targeted at the server market and is based on the SATA interface.”

There’s also the question of where Seagate’s going to get the flash for its drives, and for how much. In its hard drive business, Seagate rules the supply chain. In flash, not so much. Top flash manufacturers Samsung and Toshiba sell most of their stash to companies like Apple (AAPL), which gobble it up for gadgets like iPods and iPhones.

Seagate at least won’t be buying the same kind of multi-level cell flash that’s in most consumer devices; instead it will use the lower capacity but higher-endurance single-level cell variety. Still, though, flash prices can swing wildly, and by getting into this market Seagate will be increasing its exposure to that volatility. That’s not much of a concern for now, but over time the company will have to ink deals that guarantee its flash supply at manageable prices.

So bottom line: It’s good to see Seagate out there with its own enterprise flash storage, and it’s sure to do fine out of the gate. But to have the kind of success here that it’s had with hard drives, Seagate will have to get busy innovating – and maybe also acquiring smaller outfits that specialize in flash.

Is Apple's iPhone-without-a-phone the McDonald's Happy Meal of mobile communications?

Click to enlarge. Source: Flurry Analytics

Peter Farago of the mobile analytics firm Flurry uses data from its November report to make the case that Apple (AAPL) is quietly — and successfully — using the iPod touch to lock in a loyal base of under-age users who will eventually become the next generation of iPhone buyers.

"While it is clear that the iPhone has significant short-term revenue value for Apple," he writes in a report issued Sunday, "Flurry believes that the iPod Touch holds more long-term strategic value for Steve Jobs and team."

"In terms of Life Stage Marketing," Farago writes, "the practice of appealing to different age-based segments, Apple is using the iPod Touch to build loyalty with pre-teens and teens, even before they have their own phones (think: McDonalds' Happy Meal marketing strategy). When today's young iPod Touch users age by five years, they will already have iTunes accounts, saved personal contacts to their iPod Touch devices, purchased hundreds of apps and songs, and mastered the iPhone OS user interface." (link)

The evidence that Apple's strategy is working, Farago says, can be seen in a graph of end-user sessions recorded over the past six months.

Flurry, according to Farago, tracks 15 million end-user sessions every day from its "analytics solution" code embedded in 3,000 applications on 4 platforms: Apple's iPhone OS ( both iPhone and iPod Touch), Research in Motion's (RIMM) Blackberry, JavaME and Google (GOOG) Android.

The graph above shows that the iPod touch's share of those user sessions has grown 4 points over the past six months — the same as Android despite starting from a much larger user base. While the iPhone continues to grow in user sessions, its share in Flurry's data has dropped from 57% to 50%.

Even more significant, according to Farago, is that kind of things the kids are doing with their iPod touches.

"Anecdotally," he writes, "we know the 'iPod Touch Generation' is made up of heavy MySpace, Facebook and SMS users, who voraciously share their lives with, and influence their ever-expanding social graph. Importantly, this also includes promoting products they like. Empirically, Flurry compared how iPod Touch session usage has changed over the last six months across key application categories important to this demographic; namely, Social Networking and Games."

Farago's empirical evidence is displayed in the two charts below, which show the iPod Touch growing faster than both the iPhone and the Android devices in Flurry's Social Networking and Games categories.

Via GigaOm.

[Follow Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Twitter @philiped]