In a short period of 10 years, Wikipedia has become one of the most important websites on the internet today. It is still considered the definitive source of information on the internet, despite the fact that it can be edited by anyone (who would have thunk??!). The folks at JESS3 (who typically make the “state of” videos) made this infographic and video to explain what a great achievement Wikipedia really is.  Click the image to enlarge:

I highly recommend you watch the video (narrated by Jimmy Wales) as well – Wikipedia’s management goes a lot deeper than I imagined:

Source: The State of Wikipedia

Now that CES is over and done, we can finally relax after the flood of tablet related news. Or can we? Clearly many companies believe that tablets are the future of computing, or at least the untapped goldmine that only one company seems to have captured until now. With the iPad selling at a phenomenal rate (Steve Jobs told Walt Mossberg they currently sell an iPad every 3 seconds, and still cannot keep up), other manufacturers have been showcasing what they have been working on for the past year, and Google showed off Honeycomb, the next release of its Android Mobile operating system.

What is interesting is how people have shifted their attention from netbooks (which were very hot sellers up until now) to tablets – and the statistics show that tablets are negatively affecting netbook sales at present. What makes this amazing is that the netbook market is highly commoditized with just about every PC manufacturer out there having a few netbook models in their PC range. On the other hand, tablets are currently dominated by one company and one device. Pretty amazing.

Charl came across this pretty great infographic showing the “Tablet Takeover”, and it perfectly shows what is going on, and why other manufacturers want to get in on this market. The question still remains however – are they maybe too late? The iPad has a year’s headstart, and iPad 2 is on the way. If the iPad 2 is a more evolutionary device with not a lot of OS changes, I reckon Apple might have some trouble on their hands. Android 3.0 looks like a much more full fledged operating system than iOS, but thats just my opinion. On the other hand, perhaps the very thing that makes iPad so popular is the simplicity of the operating system…

Anyway – here is the infographic (I recommend you download it and view it in full screen – it is pretty detailed)

The folks over at Digital Surgeons made this great infographic showing the difference in users between Facebook and Twitter – and there are quite a few interesting tidbits in there:

• Looks like a larger percentage of Facebook users login everyday, but Twitter users are much more likely to update their status everyday. Its probably because they do not want to be that person that floods their friend’s newsfeeds. Come on – we all know those people…
• Facebook and Twitter have more female than male users.
• Both Facebook and Twitter have a large base who update from their mobile. And with Twitter’s official apps now available on most modern mobile operating systems, that number is only set to grow. (Twitter’s CEO now announced that 40% of tweets now originate from mobile devices)
• I do not really trust the income stats – just because these stats would have to surveys, and I do not really believe them to be representative of Facebook or Twitter. Also, only a certain subtype of online user will take part in these types of surveys.

This map by XKCD might look like a child made it, but it is in fact based on actual traffic to these sites. Here is the description:

Communities rise and fall, and total membership numbers are no longer a good measure of a community’s current size and health.  This updated map uses sizes to represent total social activity in a community – that is, how much talking, playing, sharing or other socializing happens there.  This meant some comparing of apples and oranges, but I did my best and tried to be consistent.

Do yourself a favour and look at the large version of this file, it is pretty expansive. A few things took me by surprise – look at the size of QQ and Farmville. But these communities are not a patch compared to Email and the cellular cash cow called SMS.

Another very cool map was recently created for Web 2.0 Summit, called the Points of Control Map, which integrates a few other players, not only online communities. This map is actually interactive – so I recommend you go view the full version.

This is the very same map that recently came under criticism from Mark Zuckerburg, in which he mentioned that there is one missing part – “uncharted territory“…  This is probably where innovative products like Facebook’s new messaging system would want to explore.

Source: xkcd

How sad:

But I dont think we can blame it on Google. There has been clear mismanagement, as best described in this article by TechCrunch.

Source: Scores.org

Pretty interesting observation made by Brett Jordan here. This takes into account the Apple’s most popular product 10 years ago vs now:

As our regular readers will know, we here at Bandwidth Blog like infographics, or basically anything that makes data more visually appealing, or easier to understand. I recently came across this tool from Ionz which generates a cool looking, albeit simple “view” of your own profile. When you open up the site it will ask you a few questions, and then based on percentages of the average user, generate something like this:

From there you can go and save a high resolution version for desktop. While I realize its a very simple little tool, I wish it had a few more metrics.

If you want to go and try it out – get it here. Once it fires up, just click the Union Jack at the top right to switch to english. From there answer the questions, and just wait for he infograph to generate. You can then personalize it in terms of orientation, colour, etc. Enjoy.

Google‘s rich history of acquisitions is put together in a very good format here by the guys at Scores.org. Where this infographic is handy is that they quickly identify whether a purchase was a way to enhance existing Google revenue streams, or to get rid of competitors. What I want to know is how many of these acquisitions have been enhanced since falling inside Google’s empire, and how many have died since…

Source: Scores.org