No doubt you’ve seen or even contributed to the 25 Things meme that has swept through Facebook of late, prompting old school denizens of the interwebs to heave le sigh and compare it to the September That Never Ended.

Frederic Lardinois at ReadWriteWeb says the meme has been a boon for Facebook:

“According to the latest data from Compete, four times more people than usual visited the ‘Notes’ section on Facebook in January. Compete estimates that close to 20 million users used ‘Notes’ in January, while only about 4 million used it in October 2008.

But it wasn’t just the ‘Notes’ section that profited from this meme. Facebook itself saw its traffic grow by 15% in January, which represents the fourth largest single month increase in visitors to the site. In addition, 60% more profiles were created in January than in December.”

Caroline McCarthy at The Social didn’t expect this sort of thing from Facebook users, and is curious to see if the phenomenon will take root:

“Will this mean that the newfound popularity of “notes” will last? I post photos, links, and other share-able items to my Facebook profile all the time, but I think I’ve written a Facebook note a total of once (to alert my friends list that I’d lost all their phone numbers in a personal-electronics mishap). Note-writing always struck me as something that was a little bit too promiscuous for the mainstream Facebook user, the sort of thing that navel-gazing, overshare-prone Twitterers would spring for but which didn’t fit in quite as well with the directory-like nature of the social network. Guess I was wrong.”

The growth demonstrated by the propagation of a single meme gives weight to predictions by Brett Brewer that Facebook will surpass MySpace in the social network turf wars.

Elsewhere on the web:

YouTube has started testing the market for paid-for video downloads, with one of the first test beds being the academic sector. Adam Ostrow at Mashable thinks this can only end in YouTube going head to head with iTunes in the mobile device download market.

Joshua Benton at Nieman Journalism Labs is convinced that Amazon’s Kindle will fail. Check out the comments for some interesting debate.

Twitter users proved themselves to be a rebellious bunch while unwittingly propagating a hack that plastered the Twitterverse with messages saying, ‘Don’t Click’. Frederic Lardinois at ReadWriteWeb gets to the bottom of the vulnerability.

BBC technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones blogs his thoughts on the last.fm vs Spotify debate.