Read Write Web - Details

ShareThis reports that it is now.

How do website readers prefer to share stories they find with friends? According to the company behind the widely used sharing widgetShareThis, after emailing a link, the most popular method of sharing is nowFacebook. The numbers are interesting - but there are also some big caveats to keep in mind.

The Numbers

In our enthusiasm for Web 2.0 style tools, many blog publishers may forget just how popular sharing by email is. It's clearly the favorite method. Email sharing does tend to be one to one however, having items shared on Digg or Facebook has the potential to reach many, many more people.

The big surprise here, though, is that Facebook and MySpace have emerged as hugely popular ways to share items from off-site. Have they found greater mainstream success in the relatively short time these sites have supported item sharing than dedicated social bookmarking sites that have in the years they have been online? It appears that may be the case.

We found these numbers viaAmit Agarwal's blog, which is always a great place to discover new things about the web.

Why This is Important

When publishers add the ShareThis system to their websites, they can choose which services to include buttons for. It's an important detail to take into consideration and knowing which services are most popular can help make this decision. Here at RWW we don't use ShareThis, we use another service calledAddThis. Looking at the numbers from ShareThis, though, would lead us to believe that sharing by email needs to be added and sharing by Facebook needs to be given higher billing in our widget. Other sites might make other decisions based on this data.GigaOm, for example, doesn't offer sharing by Facebook at all - something our friend Om might want to change.

Caveats

A few things to take into consideration, however, include the following:

• Your site's audience may vary. Different communities around different content topics probably have different trends in the sharing tools they use. We assume, for example, that there aren't a lot of people sharing ReadWriteWeb stories on MySpace - but maybe we're wrong!
• Some of these services use bookmarklets. These numbers aren't for all sharing, just sharing that goes on through the ShareThis widget.Delicioususers, for example, don't necessarily think of what they are doing as sharing (it's often bookmarking for personal use) and that service has its own bookmarklet.

None the less, the take away here for us is this: email, Facebook and MySpace are very popular ways for people to share things online. Publishers neglect them at our own risk.

From a company called Blue Whale Systems Ltd., makers of a free mobile push application called BlueWhaleMail, there now comes a new push application: Facebook. Via theBlueWhaleMailapp, you can be notified of your friends' status updates, wall posts, and news items. You also have the ability to send pokes, create wall posts, and email messages. The notifications you receive are displayed on your phone as soon as they as show up on Facebook...and there's no need for you to have to browse to the Facebook web site to either view them or respond.

What's BlueWhaleMail?

Out of the 2.7 billion people with mobile phones, those not carrying a smartphone still represent the majority of handset owners. But these people deserve an easy way to access their email and social network notifications, too, even if they can't afford or don't want to pay for a sophisticated smartphone.

Says Michael Maguire, founder and CTO, who previously worked in the BlackBerry Applications team at Research In Motion,"My team and I think there are some great dedicated mobile email devices out there - but we're biased, because half of us helped build one of them. Unfortunately the rest of the world's 1.1 billion email users have phones with unusable, hard to configure in-built email that few people can be bothered to set-up. With BlueWhaleMail, we've gone back to the drawing board so that people can keep the phone they like and still stay in touch on the go."

At the moment, the BlueWhaleMail app is only available for Nokia Series 60 and SonyEricsson phones, but that list will grow in time as BlueWhaleMail branches out to serve the needs of those who carry "ordinary" mobile phones.

Where To Download

BlueWhaleMail can be downloaded fromhttp://apps.facebook.com/bluewhalemail/or by browsing to m.bluewhale.net on your mobile phone. The application is ad-supported and features a small banner ad at the top of the BlueWhaleMail message viewer.

To learn more about BlueWhaleMail, check out this video, where founder Michael Maguire discusses the application:

BlueWhaleMail Interview with Michael Maguire - video powered by Metacafe

Anyone who has the iPhone or iPod Touch can tell you that one of the best things about owning the device is the ability to add apps from iTunes App Store. Although many of the apps that we talk about here are the free ones likethe social networking apps,the instant messaging apps, andthe blogging apps, it's the paid apps that are making the store a financial success.

According to today'sWall Street Journal, in the month since the Apple App Store opened, users have downloaded over 60 million programs for their iPhone or iPod Touch. Out of those that were downloaded, Apple sold an average of $1 million per day in paid applications, which brought in around $30 million over the course of the month.

If they stay the course, the App Store will make at least $360 million a year, but Steve Jobs isn't setting for that:

"This thing's going to crest a half a billion, soon," he told the WSJ reporter."Who knows, maybe it will be a $1 billion marketplace at some point in time."

However, it's worth noting that Apple won't be raking in those millions just for themselves - they only keep 30% of the proceeds, a good portion of which go to cover the costs of credit card transactions and help keep the App Store up-and-running. It's really the apps' creators who stand to gain, as they keep 70% of the proceeds.

What sort of paid apps are doing well? A quick glance at the App Store reveals that answer: games. Sega can back that up, too. They sold more than 300,000 copies of their Super Monkeyball game ($9.99) in only 20 days. According to Simon Jeffery, president of Sega's U.S. division:"It gives iPhone a justifiable claim to being a viable gaming platform."

But with numbers like these, we would argue that the iPhone goes beyond just being a gaming platform - they're a computing platform now...and a profitable one at that.