A major source of the crisis, said Kint, is the proliferation of newer research sources that, while aiming to improve metrics, have only made things more confusing. For example, he mentioned the increasingly common practice buyers and sellers blending together panel-based figures from companies like Nielsen and comScore with data from analytics companies like Compete and Google, which can lead to inaccurate comparisons and conclusions. “It gets pretty crazy,” he said.

Another problem that stems from the Web’s inherent trackability, according to Christy Tanner, editor in chief and vp, marketing, TV Guide, is that too many publishers get fixated on driving up the measures that advertisers care about, such as page-views—without considering their site’s user experience. “If everything you do is based on [driving] advertiser metrics, you’re gonna lose your users,” she said.

It’s so true. If you only care about making money, you’ll probably do a poor job at it. If you care about making a great user experience, however, you’ll probably end up making money because happy consumers equals money.

Twitter Search to dive deeper, rank results — Twitter will soon begin searching not only the text in each tweet, but will also begin indexing the content of links in tweets. In addition, Twitter search will be getting several other features that could make it a legit competitor to Google (especially for real-time results):

This will make Twitter Search a much more complete index of what’s happening in real time on the Web and make it an even more credible competitor to Google Search for people looking for very timely content.

Twitter Search will also get a “reputation” ranking system soon, Jayaram told me. When you do a search on a “trending” topic–a topic that is so big it gets its own link in the Twitter.com sidebar–Twitter will take into account the reputation of the person who wrote each tweet and rank the search results in part based on that.

Ning opens up more to developers — Ning has been a popular tool of journalists and news organizations, and it just got a more useful by allowing for more customization. These new features are long overdue, but they should help make Ning a better option for content creators.

Ning also has a new feature called Ning Apps:

There are a couple of things that make Ning Apps different from the social platforms found on the likes of Facebook or MySpace. While the earlier, limited array of apps offered on Ning was strictly for members to embed on their profiles, the formal Ning Apps product is geared toward the creators and administrators of Ning social networks. They can add an application–from a cash donation widget for a nonprofit network, to a ticket sales app for a band’s fan page, to a live video stream of what-have-you–and it’ll mesh right into the social network.

“A Ning network creator selects one of these apps, that functions basically like a full-fledged feature on the social network, and by choosing to install an app the app has a presence on the front page of the social network,” Jason Rosenthal, Ning’s senior vice president of business operations, told CNET News. “It gets a dedicated tab within a social network, and perhaps most interestingly, by default the app is installed on every (member’s) profile page of that social network.”