Google launched Ngram Viewer, an experiment to let lay users and researchers search and study the waxing and waning of phrase instances over 5.2 million books published between 1500 and 2008 that Google has indexed in its cloud computing system. There's a whole community of Ngram collection going on over at Ngrams.Tumblr.com.
via ngrams.googlelabs.com
Facebook has announced that it now has 500m active users, just six years after it was launched. The site has become the poster child of social networking on the web. While some others have seen growth, MySpace, Flickr and Bebo appear to have declined in the past year, according to these figures from Nielsen. Interesting international variations are seen, both in the amount of time Facebook users spend on the site each month and in the competing networks' popularity in different countries.
via www.bbc.co.uk