Dirk Singer:

Since Christmas the mobile photo network Instagram has gained over ten million users.  This makes Instagram the largest mobile only social network with a global reach (see comment and update below).  Foursquare by comparison is on around 22 million.

Instagram hasn’t officially announced these figures, and they aren’t published anywhere else as far as I can see.

Though of course, same question as any social network: how active? How interactive?

“A lot of what gets pinned on Pinterest is aspirational—what could be, what I’m going to have, where I’m going to go,” said <a href="http://www.gartner.com/">Gartner</a> senior research analyst Jenny Sussin. What sets Pinterest apart from other social networks is that it isn’t about sharing what’s happening to you right now, it’s about sharing and collecting what you like and what you want and what inspires you.
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Some of bloggers I talked with who use Pinterest say they depend on it as a personal tool rather than a social one. “I am always saving images for inspiration, future post ideas, and projects, so I use Pinterest every day,” said Joy Cho of <a href="http://www.ohjoy.blogs.com/">Oh Joy</a>. “It’s just fun looking at a beautiful page of images that make me happy and inspire my work.” Visual bookmarking isn’t a totally new idea—sites like <a href="http://ffffound.com/">Ffffound</a> have offered similar features. Pinterest just does it better.

That's the key thing about a social network - have a USP.

Prepare for amazing:

Maybe Justin Timberlake and friends weren't so crazy after all. Myspace, the once dominant social-networking site that faded into obscurity during Facebook's rise to dominance, added 1 million new users over the past month, according to the company.

"The numbers tell an amazing story of strong momentum and dramatic change for Myspace," said Tim Vanderhook, CEO of Myspace. "And the 1 million-plus new user accounts we've seen in the last 30 days validates our approach."

Only one word for it: impressive.

Broad-ranging and intriguing:

Gourville talks about the ’9X problem’ — "a mismatch of 9 to 1 between what innovators think consumers want and what consumers actually want."1 The 9X problem goes a long way to explaining the tech industry folk wisdom that to spread like wildfire a new product has to offer a tenfold improvement over what’s currently out there.

We'd prefer to call them doughnuts, but this is very witty.

"Moshi Monsters is a virtual pet and social networking game which has captured the minds - and pocket money - of children around the world. BBC technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones profiles the company's founder, Michael Acton Smith."

A good profile. Britain turns out to be quite good at big networks like this - don't forget that we did Friends Reunited and Bebo first too.

...And this is what it found: "Adding a new chapter to the research that cemented the phrase “six degrees of separation” into the language, scientists at Facebook and the University of Milan reported on Monday that the average number of acquaintances separating any two people in the world was not six but 4.74."

Two studies on Facebook promoted by, er Facebook. Worth bookmarking, at the very least.

"At an event last week, Facebook director of game partnerships Sean Ryan had some choice words for his new competitor. "Google has emulated aspects of our system, which is what they have the right to do," he said. "We just need to be better." He's referring to the way the companies make money from casual online games like Farmville and Words With Friends. Players pay for play time or virtual goods within the games, and the social networks take a cut of the sales. Currently, Facebook reportedly takes 30% from game developers, whereas Google takes just 5%."

Ouch. Search Engine Land chief tells it like it his: "For one, you know that Twitter and Facebook both support brands, and that there would obviously be demand for this here. You failed to implement that support. Bad on you."

"Microsoft is working on a social/design project called Tulalip, according to details from a splash page that was accidentally published to Socl.com recently.<br />
"As of Thursday, Microsoft has taken down the splash page and replaced it with a message acknowledging the project.<br />
"'Thanks for stopping by. Socl.com is an internal design project from a team in Microsoft Research which was mistakenly published to the web. We didn’t mean to, honest,' the message states."<br />
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Can the world bear another giant company building a social network? However, the suggestion is that it would tie into Facebook and Twitter - and the interface looks like the "tiles" of the forthcoming Windows 8. It could just be misdirection.

"Smartphone owners around the world are rapidly adopting mobile for internet use, according to new research from Google and the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA). While PC use for internet access is still prevalent, smartphones are increasingly popular for social networking, online video access, and even making purchases.<br />
"The survey found that 31% of US internet users had a smartphone, similar to the UK’s 30%, but far above Japan’s 6%. According to an eMarketer estimate, 31% of US mobile users will have a smartphone by the end of this year, rising to 43% by 2015."<br />
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The smartphone number for Japan is stunning; yet they use them to go online all the time. A peculiar wrinkle to the days when Japanese phones were seen as leading the world.

Dave Winer's rather insightful version: "I've been to so many big earth-shaking events from BigTechCo's -- today's Google thing is making me yawn, while my eyes glaze over in boredom.  <br />
"Here's how products like this are conceived..."<br />
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A must-read, even for Winer-haters.

"Despite a positive early reception to the service, the big challenge for Google+ isn’t pleasing users in its first few days, it’s finding a solid place for it in their lives in the long term. What will that place be? At present, it’s difficult to say. Looking at the currently big social networks, they fit into a few core categories:<br />
• Sharing and communicating with friends: Facebook, Hyves, Orkut etc.<br />
• Sharing quick thoughts, news and opinions: Twitter<br />
• Business-focused networking: LinkedIn, Xing, Viadeo etc.<br />
"So where does Google+ fit into this? It manages to sit across all these verticals. The use of ‘Circles’ to organise friends and contacts means you can share business-focused information with your colleagues and photos of a night out with your friends in the same place without too much fear of them crossing over into the wrong audiences. The big question is, can Google convince a groundswell of people to make the switch from their existing social networks?"

Gina Trapani: "After a half day of using Google+ with the limited number of people I know in the field test so far, I like it a lot. I will love Google+ when and if all my friends show up and stick around.<br />
"I've been been watching Google flail around social web apps for a few years now, so what I appreciate most about Google+ is that it's a well-thought out product informed by past experience. The more I use Google+, the more I see just how many lessons Google learned from Wave and Buzz.."

Skyscraper infographics are this year's .... [suggestions welcome]

As ever, make sure to hover over the image to get the extra joke in the title text.

Steven Levy, author of 'In The Plex': "The image was discovered by Google VP of product management Bradley Horowitz when he opened Google Image Search and typed “Emerald Sea” — which had just been chosen as the project code name. The first result, a depiction of an 1878 painting created by German immigrant artist Albert Bierstadt, so impressed Horowitz that he commissioned a pair of art students to copy it on the wall facing the fourth floor elevators. That way, the hundreds of workers contributing to Emerald Sea would draw inspiration as they headed to their computers to remake Google into a major social networking force.<br />
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"The massive wave symbolizes the ways Google views the increasingly prominent social aspect of the web — as a possible tsunami poised to engulf it, or a maverick surge that it will ride to glory."

“I clearly knew that I had to do something, and I failed to do it,” Eric Schmidt said. “A CEO should take responsibility. I screwed up.”

Her account on Tumblr was zapped, and now she finds a company blogging there using the handle she has used since her university/college days: "A few years ago, I learned that there is a technology consulting company called Zephoria.com. And apparently, they’ve become a social media consulting company. In recent years, I’ve found that they work hard to block me from using the handle of zephoria on various social media sites. Even before the midnite land grab on Facebook, they squatted the name zephoria, probably through some payment to the company. But this is a new low… Now they’re STEALING my accounts online!?!?!? WTF?!?!?!"

Scoble pitches in: "I watched two girls pull out their iPhones. One used Red Laser to scan a book in the store. Another checked in with Foursquare. <br />
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"I realized just what they were doing: wasting time more efficiently!<br />
"Google doesn’t get this new behavior. Google’s engineering culture doesn’t quite grok why people would waste time. Why they would update their Facebook profiles for hours every week. Or, even, set “relationship status.” Yeah, they might copy Mark Zuckerberg and put some of those features into whatever social system they will reveal at Google IO, but I don’t think the culture really gets why those things work.<br />
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"They help us waste time more effectively."