A new study from security firm Barracuda Labs provides some interesting insights into the state of the Twitterverse. Unfortunately for the microblogging startup, the stats say that most of its users aren’t very active. The study looked at around 19 million Twitter accounts (PDF) in order to figure out how people are using…

Web-based Twitter client Brizzly has three major developments to report: a new free iPhone app, a new Brizzly Guide (which gives trending topics on Twitter their own hub pages as permanent resources for information on the top Twitter discussion items over time), and the acquisition of WikiRank. The Brizzly Guide is a …

The Social Analyst is a weekly column by Mashable Co-Editor Ben Parr , where he digs into social media trends and how they are affecting companies in the space. Facebook; Twitter; LinkedIn; YouTube; Wordpress: these companies, built from the ground-up, are mainstays in social media. None of them were created by a large tech…

Cliff Atkinson is author of The Backchannel : How Audiences are Using Twitter and Social Media and Changing Presentations Forever (New Riders, 2009). What do you do when you’re giving a presentation, and notice that your audience is looking down, busily typing on their laptops and smartphones? And what about when …

It seems hundreds of Twitter accounts have started to Tweet out “weight loss” product spam today. Specifically, users who have had their accounts hijacked are Tweeting the message “I lost 20 lbs in 2 weeks!” and links to diet sites. Our source counts over 200 rogue tweets so far tonight. It’s …

Sarah Killen loves gummy dinosaurs, coke syrup, peanut butter and now Conan O’Brien. The Michigan gal — not a fan of Russell Bigos, her sister-in-law’s treadmill singing or cleaning — happens to be the only person that the jilted late night personality follows on Twitter . Conan, who up…

The second annual Shorty Awards ceremony went down this week in New York City, honoring the community-nominated and voted on best of the best from Twitter. Awards were given in 26 official categories as well as a huge selection of crowdsourced community categories . The Twitter community was invited to contribute nominations beginning this …

Don’t get us wrong, we love YouTube’s new automatic captioning feature . A couple of years ago it was almost unimaginable that someone (or something) could take videos, convert speech to text, then translate that text into 20 or 30 languages, and do it all automatically, in a blink of a second…

It’s official: Twitter has surpassed 10 billion tweets . While Gigatweet’s counter is down due to over-traffic., you can tell by the actual tweet ID numbers that we have crossed the magical threshold. The milestone shows that Twitter’s still growing at a rapid pace: it broke 1 billion tweets …

Simple blogging platform Tumblr has finally added the ability to add static pages to your Tumblelog. Tumblr has grown a great deal without this feature — it’s simplicity has always been its selling point. However, many companies need static pages — it’s often the best way to provide…