One of the funniest things I've ever seen is this Louis C.K. interview on Conan (team Coco for life):

Whenever my wife and are being impatient we say "it's going to space" and we both get a giggle and know that we're being ridiculous for expecting everything in life to be instant.

Well, bloggers don't have to worry about that any more. Blogger has launched its new Stats tool, which gives them real-time analytics for their blog. Of couse, some people are running their websites on the Blogger platform with custom urls, which means real-time analytics are now a reality.

Technorati has the back story on Stats:

Anyone remember MeasureMap? For those that don't - Jeffrey Veen and Adaptive Path sold their analytics platform to Google over four year ago. The MeasureMap product was built mainly for blogger. It was a great opportunity for Google to improve its own analytics platform (Urchin), which is now known as Google Analytics.

As after the acquisition, people were guessing that Google would implement it with the Blogger.com, but they never did, 'til now.

Google Analytics is far more advanced and features rich data, but don't forget, Blogger Stats provides the data in real time and there's no coding.

Facebook has positioned itself as the dominant player in the social media game, and recently released data only proves that fact out more. Facebook continues to grow at a neck-break speed while most other social media outlets have started to top off or shrink.

Some interesting info collected about Facebook users in the same study:

• 41% say Facebook is a good way to get information about companies and products.
• 32% are more likely to become a fan of a company their friends are already fans of.
• 31% are interested in having more companies available to interact with through Facebook.
• 30% feel like a valued customer when they're able to connect with a company on Facebook.

Just when you thought all of your friends and family were over Facebook, Nielsen released this juicy tidbit. I can't help but wonder what momentous happening will trigger a social decline....

Social media and ROI: two things that should be very important to every business. From Social Media Today:

As social media becomes more of a mainstream fixture, there’s not surprisingly growing discussion about success and how it can be measured. Within the business world, it’s all about the return on investment, or ROI.

Defining and tracking ROI in social media can be a bit tricky though.

The key is defining your goal upfront and tailoring your social media campaign to meet that goal. Do you want to build your brand, increase your sales or something else entirely? These things aren't mutually exclusive by any means, but knowing your primary goal will help shape your social media efforts and let you know what metrics you should be tracking.

The New York Times posted a brief article about the big finale of Lost, a show that keeps everyone chitter-chatting online about the outcome. From 2 p.m. Sunday to 2 a.m. Monday morning, there was a total of 437,613 tweets (this outcome was actually viewed as lower than anticipated).

TechCrunch interviewed Virgin America, Comcast and Cisco about their social media use, and the companies had some interesting things to say.

There's a lot of insight into how social media changes a company internally, as well as how these companies have found success through social media. I think the key takeaways are:

• Define your ROI
• Have a business objective
• Empower your employees
• Personalize your brand

Healthcare NTI is billed as "the first social media tracking tool to monitor public opinions on healthcare".

Because the Healthcare NTI is based on the national discourse, it provides a real-time, accurate picture of what the public is saying about any topic related to healthcare, at any point in time. In addition to the NTI, the Narrative Tracker Arc™ follows the rise and fall of sub-stories within the main narrative to provide a comprehensive overview of the opinions surrounding a single issue.

I'm not going to jump into the beehive that is arguing the accuracy, or inaccuracy, of a tool like this, but I will be interested to see if social media tracking tools are sold to and used by politicians. Are tweets the true voice of the people?

Ever wondered which of your tweets won some followers and which turned some off? Enter TweetEffect. Simply enter your Twitter ID in the form and they will analyze your tweets. They are then displayed in a nice frequency graph and charted for individual tweets. So what are you waiting for? Go enter your ID and see what your winning tweets are.

This is pretty neat. Facebook has been analyzing the global "happiness" level via keywords on status updates and such. Apparently, things like sports and disasters can really take a negative toll on our readout. As the graph above shows, there are a few slumps corelated to things like Ireland losing the World Cup playoffs and Chile's earthquake. Great trends to analyze.

OK, maybe that's a slight exaggeration. But according to Compete, the number of unique visitors to Twitter.com hasn't just peaked over the past year — it's dropped 9.6% in the last 2 months.

What's up with that? Are people tired of tweeting? Are third-party Twitter clients like Tweetie and TweetDeck drinking Twitter's milkshake? Or is it just a road bump that's about to get paved by @anywhere and Twitter's impending app power-move? Share your thoughts in the comments below.