links for 2010-04-23

Basarab Eftimie Nicolescu (b. March 25, 1942, Ploieşti, Romania) is a theoretical physicist at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Laboratoire de Physique Nucléaire et de Hautes Énergies, Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris. He is also a Professor at the Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania and Docteur ès-Sciences Physiques (PhD), 1972, Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris.
He is the president and founder of the International Center for Transdisciplinary Research and Studies (CIRET), a non-profit organization.
He is also a specialist in the theory of elementary particles and a major advocate of the transdisciplinary reconciliation between science and the humanities. He has published many articles on the role of science in contemporary culture in journals in France, Romania, Italy, United Kingdom, Brazil, Argentina, Japan and in the USA. 
(Via TVRI)

Facebook has taken a clear lead, with nearly half of driven traffic, with StumbleUpon in a surprising second place position, accounting for nearly a quarter of all traffic, and Twitter just behind that with one out of every 10 hits to websites from social media. Myspace, on the other hand, has virtually disappeared, dropping from 16% of hits to nearly 1% this month.

(…) La barre symbolique des 50% de taux d’installation a été dépassée en Mars 2010 (…)

An intranet that features multiple social media tools for most or all employees to use as collaboration vehicles for sharing knowledge with other employees. A social intranet may feature blogs, wikis, discussion forums, social networking, or a combination of these or any other Web 2.0 (intranet 2.0) tool with at least some or limited exposure (optional) from the main intranet or portal home page (…)

1. # of registered users: 105,779,710 (1,500% growth over the last three years.)
2. # of new sign-ups per day: ~ 300,000 (More recently, 60% of new accounts were from outside the U.S.)
3. # of new tweets per day: 55 million
4. # of unique daily visitors to the site twitter.com: ~ 180 million. (That's actually dwarfed by the traffic that flows through twitter's API — 75% of traffic is through the API.)
5. # of API requests per day: 3 billion
6. # of registered apps: 100,000 (from 50,000 in Dec/2009)
7. # of search queries per day: 600 milion
8. Twitter's instance, of their recently open-sourced graph database (FlockDB), has 300 13 billion edges and handles 100,000 reads per second.
9. # of servers1: "… in the hundreds"
10. Blackberry's just released twitter app accounted for 7% of new sign-ups over the last few days
11. A NY Times story gets tweeted every 4 seconds.