Android and Me » analytics

Google+ lands several new features; trending topics, analytics, photo editing and more

Dustin Earley — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 19:52:35 +0000

Google has just announced several new features rolling out now to Google+ users everywhere. Not only has Google added a trending topics feature known as What’s Hot, but they’ve also added a built-in photo editor and Google+ Ripples, a “visualization tool for public shares and comments.”

What’s Hot

What’s Hot is one feature that Google+ has been sorely lacking for some time now. Real time searches and hashtag support have helped display popular content for any specific area, but what if you just want to see the most popular posts on Google+ in general? That’s what What’s Hot is for. Now built into your main stream and viewable as its own circle, What’s Hot will display popular posts that are receiving a lot of +1s and comments. Google has clearly spent a lot of time on What’s Hot. It’s very smooth, there doesn’t appear to be any duplicate content, and there’s a wide variety of posts listed. To check out What’s Hot on Google+, just scroll down in your timeline and look for the What’s Hot box, or use the What’s Hot link under your circles in the left sidebar.

Google+ Ripples

Analytics buffs are going to love Google+ Ripples. Ever wonder about the history of a shared post? How did it get so many shares? And who originally propelled it? Google+ Ripples is a handy tool that can be used with any shared public post on Google+. Let’s say there’s a post with 300 shares and you’d like to see how it got so popular. If you use the drop down menu in the top right corner of the post, you can select Ripples. From there, a new tab will pop up that displays a diagram of who shared the post and when. You can zoom in on the diagram and click around for more details as well. Near the bottom of the Ripples page is a timeline that shows the spread of the post, along with some handy statistics.

Google+ Creative Kit

Google+ Creative Kit is Google’s response to the simple photo editing trend made popular by apps like Instagram and PicSay. Once a picture is uploaded to Google+, you can click the edit button to bring up Creative Kit. From there, you can crop, rotate, auto-fix and add any number of vintage filters to give your photos some extra charm. Right now, there’s also some Halloween effects you can add to your photos to celebrate the holiday.

It’s also worth noting that Google has finally opened up Google+ for Google Apps users. If you get a chance to give any of Google+’s new features a shot, be sure to come back here and let us know what you think.

Myxer: Android overtakes iPhone in “AT&T-less” states

Taylor Wimberly — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 19:04:44 +0000

The 2010 election season is right around the corner, but we are breaking out the maps early for a mobile race. Android vs iPhone.

Myxer is a mobile entertainment company that has delivered more than a billion downloads (ringtones, wallpapers, videos, etc.) to mobile phones. They have over 350,000 unique registered users who have Android handsets so they decided to get in the mobile metrics game (And why not? Everyone else is doing it.)

In their January report, they found Android usage has overtaken iPhone in eight states. Of the eight states controlled by Android, seven of them are from the Midwest great plains including Arizona, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming. Some are speculating Android has picked up in these states because Verizon is the only carrier to offer broad 3G coverage in these areas.

Other interesting notes from the Myxer report include:

Google’s Nexus One is the ‘manliest’ of all the Android Handsets. 75% of registered Myxer users with the Nexus One phone are Male.
The Samsung Behold II and the HTC myTouch both have the largest percentage of female user’s on Myxer, with 67% of users on each handset being female.
In January 2010 the average woman downloaded more mobile entertainment than the average man across every single Android device.
Motorola DROID users are the least active consumers on the Android operating system, with the average user consuming 4 pieces of mobile entertainment per month.
HTC’s Dream (G1) seems to be the handset of choice for the younger demographic. 57% of the downloads Myxer sees from HTC Dream handset are initiated from users who are between the age of 18 and 24. This is the largest percentage of users in this age demographic on any Android device on Myxer.

Gender breakdown for Myxer users.

DROID already making an impact on web traffic

Clark Wimberly — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 20:18:05 +0000

The web analytics company, Clicky, is reporting that the Motorola DROID is already accounting for 23% of all Android web traffic. The numbers are based on the 150,000 sites running Clicky analytics, which is a pretty solid sample size. Check out the numbers below (keeping in mind that the device was only released last week):

DROID making an impact

According to our own numbers, the DROID is making up about 18% of our current Android traffic. On top of that, over the past week, we’ve started seeing a couple hits coming in from devices running 2.1, which we can only hope is the OTA update which is supposed to be arriving in the next month or so.

[via BGR]