Daily Dose of social media: Android growing fast

Android Growing Fast, But Not as Fast as iPhone — The mobile space is just starting to explode with several advanced smartphone OSes on the market. The iPhone gets most of the press, but there are other platforms that news organizations and content producers should be keeping a keen eye on (and producing products for). Android is one of those platforms:

Looking at AdMob’s statistics, the HTC Dream, the first Android-based phone, generates 2% of their US requests and is now the fourth smartphone overall, behind the iPhone, BlackBerry Curve, and BlackBerry Pearl. It has also managed to capture 6% share of the smartphone OS market in the US.

Remember that Android is only on one handset right now, and it is still doing pretty well when it comes to mobile Web usage and mobile apps. Android will be appearing on several more handsets later this year and should really begin to take off. Smart news organizations will be watching Android closely. Any smart news organization already has some mobile-focused products and probably at least one iPhone app.

Would You Pay for a Facebook Vanity URL? — “Apparently, Facebook has been asking some of its users whether they would be prepared to pay for a vanity URL. That means having something meaningful as the address of your Facebook profile; for example, “facebook.com/stan” instead of a random string of characters.”

I could see companies like The New York Times being interested in an easy-to-remember URL like facebook.com/nytimes. Or how about facebook.com/beatblogging? I don’t know how much people would be willing to pay for this feature, but I can imagine that many companies would be interested in paying for an easy-to-remember-and-SEOed-up URL If a company is getting value out of Facebook’s non-sensical URLs than it will certainly get even more value out a quality vanity URL.

Facebook, like Twitter, could make money by selling premium features to business customers. Companies are making money off of social networks and wouldn’t mind spending a little money to make even more money.

6 Twitter Search Services Compared — There are several options available for searching Twitter, and Mashable compares six of them. Search.twitter.com was the benchmark they used, and they were able to find alternative search engines that were either more powerful or simpler than search.twitter.com.

Of all the alternative search engines that Mashable looked at Twazzup is probably the best option for content producers, due to its feature-rich nature:

Starting with Twazzup, this is Twitter Search on steroids. For any given query string, you can see results down the left column that are updated in real-time.

A feature I like, albeit slow at times, is if you mouseover an avatar, a bubble pops up with another look at the avatar, a “follow” link to their homepage, and other information from their Twitter.com settings, such as locations, bios, website links, and the number of followers and friends.

Other features are vertical down the right column, including popular tweets, avatars of the trendmakers (those who are responsible for the most retweets), related photos, and the most popular links that people are tweeting or retweeting. In this case, since I typed in “mashable,” you can see @mashable and @tweetmeme. While not an immediate fan of the related photos section, I can see its usefulness during breaking events to be able to view popular twitpics without having to click tweeted links.