It’s the Social Media Roundup, and I’m just bitter I didn’t get to go to sunny Austin.

…because if I had, I may have been part of the world’s longest live-streamed crowd surf.

SXSWhatever

So once more, the nation’s geeks, nerds, and wannadorks gathered in Austin, TX this week for a meeting of the memes at SXSWi.  But there was no joy in Mudville; this year it was different.  Folks fled the Twitter keynote interview in droves, and generally had a lousy time.  Except all these happy, smiling people.  Pay no attention to them.

It’s our page, we set the rules, it was ever thus

Nestle heard from their Facebook fans today.  A fairly innocent, though perhaps heavy-handed trademark-defending request turned ugly, and the page administrator handled it rather poorly.  Twitter mobs, to arms!

YouTube goes all Marty McFly

Yes, I’m a metrics guy.  But sometimes the math just gets a bit wonky.  For instance, YouTube announced this week that users are uploading 24 hours of content to the vid-sharing service every single minute. One day every 60 seconds. I envision servers run by tiny Deloreans with tinier Mr. Fusions to power it all.  I have an active imagination.

We like our social media, but we have to find it first

A couple of studies out this week shed new light on where social media fits in the average person’s day-to-day.  The BBC, for instance, tells us that search sites take the largest chunk of traffic among the top 100 sites on the Internet, with social networks and blogs much lower.  But when we find them, we sure are hooked.  Retrevo reports that roughly half of us are tweeting after bedtime, and a quarter of respondents under 25 have no problem texting from the toilet.  I’m a little grossed-out just typing that.