I was reading today’s NYT article on Google+’s new redesign and found myself continually puzzled by the key metric Google continues to report as the success of their new social product: Registered Users.

Laralyn McWilliams and I gave a talk today at GDC. These are the slides for those who are interested: Intuition vs. Metrics: How Social Game Design Has Evolved.

How much is a shared link on Facebook worth? For online ticketing service Eventbrite, each time someone shares a link to an event with their Facebook friends it results in $2.52 worth of ticket sales. In contrast, a Twitter share is only worth $0.43, and a LinkedIn share is worth $0.90. Sharing an event through Eventbrite’s email sharing tool is worth $2.34, almost as much as Facebook. On average, across all social channels, each share is worth an average of $1.78 for Eventbrite.

“It looks like around 92% of the people playing the full version of [the pictured] Ricochet Infinity pirated it.” It’s moments like those that make people in the industry stop dead in their tracks. 92% is a huge number and though we were only measuring people who had gotten the game from Reflexive and gone online with it, it seemed improbable that those who acquired the game elsewhere or didn’t go online were any more likely to have purchased it. As we sat and pondered the financial implications of such piracy, it was hard to get past the magnitude of the number itself: 92%.

Three million iPads have been sold in 80 days, Apple has announced. The tablet device launched in the US on April 3 and internationally on May 28. Apple said that developers have created over 11,000 new apps for iPad, which is also capable of running “almost all” of the 225,000 apps on the App Store. “People are loving iPad as it becomes a part of their daily lives,” said Apple CEO Steve Jobs. “We’re working hard to get this magical product into the hands of even more people around the world.”