Flipping a coin may not be the fairest way to settle disputes. About a decade ago, statistician Persi Diaconis started to wonder if the outcome of a coin flip really is just a matter of chance. He had Harvard University engineers build him a mechanical coin flipper. Diaconis, now at Stanford University, found that if a coin is launched exactly the same way, it lands exactly the same way.

The randomness in a coin toss, it appears, is introduced by sloppy humans. Each human-generated flip has a different height and speed, and is caught at a different angle, giving different outcomes.

Sooner or later most of us need to collect some Internet statistics. Maybe it is for your homework, maybe it is for a market research you are doing for a project, maybe it is just out of curiosity. Over the years I came across several websites that provide these stats, and I decided to list the best ones in this post.

Decision makers, press, media, and users are hungry for numbers, so I’ll start to aggregate them as I see them.

How I interpret stats
Numbers don’t tell us much without insight and interpretation, in fact, you’re going to see conflicting numbers of usage from many of the agencies and social networks themselves. The key is to look at trend movements, don’t focus on the specific numbers but the changes to them over time. I put more weight on active unique users in the last 30 days vs overall registered, in fact, the actual active conversion rate will often range from 10-40% of actual users sticking around and using the social network, so don’t be fooled by puffed numbers. No single metric is a good indicator, you have to evaluate the usage from multiple dimensions, so you also have to factor in what are users doing, time on site, interaction, and of course, did they end up buying, recommending products, or improving their lives.

A Collection of Social Network Stats for 2009
I’ll be updating this post throughout the year, bookmark it, and share it with others

Fast, easy access to Google Analytics on your iPhone/iPod Touch