This is quite a thought: recent data released by NPD has shown that Android controls 61% of the US smartphone market. ComScore had it as 51%. These numbers, according to MG Siegler (aka parislemon), is just plain wrong. They don't correlate with sales numbers recorded by the networks at all. Without going into the numerical detail (it's all in his post), Apple is shown to control just about 50% of the US market. That means, the other 50% is split up between Android, Nokia and RIM. To add insult to injury, that is with iPhone only being available on the three biggest carriers (which, together, account for 80% of the market). Which brings us to a previous point he made in 2010: Apple is letting Android win. Riveting stuff!

The gaping Machine Curation gap

Über-blogger Om Malik this week wrote about a sore issue for Twitter – how to figure out users' interests. "Why do they need to do that, users do that for themselves on Twitter, don't they?", you might argue. Exactly, but for every user that figures out how to do this, Twitter loses numbers of other potential users, who never make it far beyond registering. The next logical step for Twitter is to figure out how to show new users exactly what they want, and even how to push more serendipitous content to seasoned users. Which is why they bought Summify, and which is why they've launched a new discover tab, to help users discover new content. Meanwhile, with Summify gone, several other players, like News.me (by the New York Times) and Percolate, are also scrambling to fill the auto-curation gap as quickly as possible. May the best player win!

Facebook

While Twitter seems to be struggling with auto-curation, it's been at the heart of the Facebook experience all along. Few people understand the Facebook Edgerank algorithm, and Econsultancy has a very thorough piece on what marketers need to know about it. Facebook needs to stimulate this kind of understanding – the lack of it might just blow up in its face, as this piece by Wall Street Journal warns. Big advertisers are apparently starting to feel that they're paying too much for Facebook ads, because of the lack of proper ROI analysis. However, Facebook has just released another trick from its sleeve: Mobile Discovery. Allowing a link in Facebook to open an app, Mobile Discovery has sent 160 million users to mobile apps last month, up from 60 million just the month before. It is bound to be even higher this month, since Facebook has only just rolled out mobile discovery for Android. This might have the big advertisers paying even more for their sponsored stories. On the social good front, Facebook has called on their users to flag their Organ Donor status on their public profiles. And to top all that, it seems UK bouncers are starting to use Facebook on their mobile phones for age verification. Thát's how ubiquitous Facebook's become!

US Court Rules that FB like is not speech, therefore not free

What?! Exactly. In a case where a US Sheriff fired people who "liked" his opposition on Facebook during the foregoing election, the US district court of Eastern Virginia had the following to say:

"It is the court's conclusion that merely "liking" a Facebook page is insufficient speech to merit constitutional protection. In cases where courts have found that constitutional speech protections extended to Facebook posts, actual statements existed within the record."

This is a very dangerous statement, and mark our words – this will soon be used against someone in a bad way. Does this judge still read his paper, or did the past one and a half years just completely pass him by?

There's a Revolution in Education

In the latest print version of Wired magazine, they had an article on how Stanford University opened up the course material to one of their computer science courses online. With video lectures, assignments, and auto-gradings on those assignments. The only difference: the online students don't get official credit. One of the lecturers expected an optimistic 1000 online students. The other, a laughable 10000. The outcome: a staggering 160000 online students enrolled! Now, in the wake of that bombshell, two groups of universities are scrambling to capitalise on this potential. On the one hand, we have MIT and Harvard, who have just announced their plans to open up classes and course materials online in collaboration, and on the other hand, Stanford, Princeton, Berkeley, et al, who already have a very impressive list of courses available. This must be the biggest disruption of education since Plato's time.

Reddit does it – again

Reddit never ceases to amaze. This week, a thread popped up, enticing fellow Redditors to spill their guts about their "one big secret". It became a comment fest to start at least thirty PhD's in sociology. This is the Reddit we know, and love, providing social insight that millions of surveys can never do.

Creative of the Week – Iris van Herpen

We like the fashion industry here at RAAK: it's a fast-moving creative beast. So when fashion and technology come together we take special notice. Dutch designer Iris van Herpen has taken bespoke design a step further and used a 3D-printer to produce her new collection. The results are special. As she says in this Wired interview: "It freed me from all physical limitations. Suddenly, every complex structure was possible."

One of the often repeated things about Pinterest is that it is Reddit for females. So what is Reddit? In some ways it is the new 4chan (the arnachic community site said to have spawned anonymous). Other comparisons is with tech news community Slashdot. In other words a mixture of irreverence and in-depth technology discussions. They were the main driving force behind the January 18th anti-SOPA Internet blackout, and as a result, got thrown into the spotlight. That's probably why Woody Harrelson's PR team decided it would be a good idea to let him do an AMA (Ask Me Anything) on Reddit, promoting his new movie, Rampart. An AMA is kind of like a mass interview, with one main difference. Anything goes. And this is the point mr Harrelson's PR team did not quite research. It did not go down well. After being flamed to bits for only answering questions directly related to the movie, he was accused for gatecrashing a high-school prom after party, taking a girl's virginity, and never phoning her afterwards. Mr Harrelson, Rampart & Co. are still picking up the pieces of a shattered Public Image. Social Media pays, but it is powerful, and can blow up in your face if you don't do your research properly …

Clash of the weak tie titans

There's a reason why Twittter is so compelling. It's because it's a weak tie network (that is – not for close friends and family), which allow us to discover new stuff, interesting people and perhaps even sexual partners. But Twitter is threathened by the dramatic rise of both Google Plus and Pinterest, both of which are weak tie networks themselves. Pinterest has an added trick up its sleeve. It is tilted in favour of sharing (curation) rather than creation. Creation is much harder than curation. And a new study shows that 80 percent of all pins are re-pins, meaning that an overwhelming majority of content shared on site is recycled between users. To top that off, Pinterest retains and engages users two to three times more efficiently than Twitter did at the same time in its history. Yikes!

Trojan Tweets

But it's not all bad news for Twitter. The latest is that Apple will extend its integration of Twitter – which is already baked into iOS devices (iPhones, iPads, iPods), into the Mac operating system. That's not all – Vimeo and Flickr will also come along for the ride.

Pinning down Pinterest

We know Pinterest is big among women in particular. But like Twitter (and bicycling), if you have not done it, you can explain the action, but not how it works and how it makes you feel. Here is the best explantion we could find so far:

'Pinning' by any other name is something we all do every day. We clip out recipes, we bookmark blog posts, we note the cut of the jacket of a passerby, we take a mental picture of a neighbor's living room layout, we marvel at the colors in a photograph on the gallery wall, we read a passage we like somewhere and save it for later.

And Pinterest is much better placed to monetise its content:

Etsy.com, an online crafts marketplace with 50,600 Pinterest followers, is using Pinterest's price display feature. When Pinterest users "pin", an Etsy chair on a board for their followers to see, the image of the chair will automatically include the chair's title, and a banner showing the price.

Apple reacts to AddressBook-gate

Last week we wrote about Path's PR predicament, after uploading users' address books to their servers. The news was barely out, or other services started popping like popcorn, admitting that they've been doing it too. Including Twitter. Apple realized that the problem should be solved on platform level, and announced that they're going to restrict access to the Address Book in a near future iOS release, prompting users for permission before giving an app access to the Address Book. Interesting, on a technical note, is that all of this could have been prevented if developers used proper cryptographic hashing to protect the uploaded information. We're going to be flamed for this, but this is why the "closed" Apple approach, regulating developers' access to the system, makes sense.

Instagram fiddling while Rome pins

Instagram updated their iPhone app interface, added a filter and knocked one of the reasons to use the popular Camera Plus app – sharpening – on the head. But with Pinterest's mobile app including a camera and rudimentary editing settings, would their time not be better spent rolling out an Android, and even a web interface?

Popping on Instagram

A few weeks back we featured a story by Dirk Singer of Rabbit on Instagram subcultures and group 'popping'. This week, thanks to Dirk, Wessel was invited into one of these closed groups for two pop sessions. At an alloted time, the group posts their photos, and they cross-like and comment each others pics. If this happens in a short enough space of time, your pic appears on the Popular page, giving you a lot more exposure, and your picture literally Pops with likes! Pop sessions developed amongst Instagrammers as a reaction when pics of celebrities, cats and girls started to dominate the Popular Page. Wessel never managed to Pop, but got a fascinating insight, none the less, into how Instagrammers organise.

Creative of the Week: Alex Allmont

Normally we discover our Creatives of the Week online. This week is different. Someone who works with us went to the Kinetic Art Fair here in London, and discovered Alex Allmont, a brilliant kinetic artist who builds amazing mechanisms out of Lego. From exquisite musical clockworks like this, to this automatic plaiting machine, his works are truly inspired.