That’s the conclusion of the latest comScore study which finds that women spend far more time than men online connecting with their social network of friends and acquaintances. Perhaps that’s not surprising until you consider that women, on average, spend roughly 90 minutes more per month on social networks than men. That amounts to 5.5 hours/month for women on the likes of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube compared to about 4 hours for men.

As the tech press (and Diane Sawyer) prepare for the imminent, champagne-filled announcement of Facebook eclipsing the 500 million user barrier, we hate to be killjoys here at SMI but we feel it necessary to point out that the first 500 million, that was the easy part. For Facebook, the vast unconquered terrain lies in China, Japan, Korea and Russian-speaking countries where Facebook is an also-ran.

The mobile apps marketplace will top a staggering 25 billion downloads by 2015, according to new research by Juniper Research. To put that in further perspective: the estimate is that smart phone sales will reach 1 billion annually by the same period. That’s an impressive number of downloads per handset user.

Like the coffee fiends we are, we are anxiously pressing the refresh button on the Starbucks Facebook page as it nears an unprecedented milestone for a consumer brand: the first to 10 million fans.

Is Twitter adding a new pay-for-followers scheme to boost sagging brands and would-be celebs? What about a new real-time analytics tool to make sense of up-to-the-minute conversation streams?

Our online video habit is rapidly becoming a pastime, with new research showing that the average online viewer spent more than 13 hours a month viewing online videos in May. Does this hail the end …

With potential shoppers browsing for tips on the hottest new styles, online clothing retailers are actively trying to boost their social media followers and, naturally, sales. Which online retailers are making the most use of …

Online clothing retailer ASOS, super popular with the twenty-something Facebook generation, is the Zappos of Europe, building a massively loyal online community around its latest fashions. This social-savvy formula appears to be making even the company bean-counters happy, as the dot-com reported this week a fat profit and double-digit sales growth in an otherwise tough retail market. Always curious about the connection of community-building and its impact on sales, we take a look here at the relationship between its social media investment and its impact on the top line.

Face it, we’re all suckers for a good list, a league table that ranks THE BIGGEST, the best, the most important. Marketers are no exception, of course, always trying to measure the ups and downs of the biggest/best/most important brands in our lives. The problem is the methodology to determine the best brand in the universe is questionable, at best. Now that we can measure Facebook fans and Twitter followers and YouTube subscribers can social media change all this? One firm thinks it can. And the winner is…

Mike Schwede of Orange8 Interactive, whose work on the impact of the Nestlé-Greenpeace pressure campaign we’ve highlighted here before, has just published an in-depth social media brand analysis of troubled Big Oil heavy, BP. As Schwede points out, before the April 2oth Deepwater Horizon spill, BP critics were in the minority. The BP-bashing now dominates online discourse, and the bad blood appears to be going from bad to worse.