About 24 percent of teens who go online were using Twitter at the end of 2012, marking a dramatic increase from the 16 percent who were on Twitter in 2011. The new findings on teen social media use and attitudes toward online privacy come from a new report from the Pew Research Center, “Teens, Social Media and Privacy,” that’s set to release on Tuesday. Here’s how things changed in just a year:

Apart from the raw numbers, Pew conducted focus groups with teens across the country to get feedback on how they use different sites. Here are the five most important trends you should know about teens and social media:

1. Teens are outpacing the grown-ups on Twitter

The rise in Twitter use among teens is particularly interesting since adult adoption hovers around 16 percent, according to the latest Pew report on adult social media use. Numbers among online teens are even stronger for African-Americans, 39 percent of whom are on the service (compared to 23 percent of white teens). Teens have shown a remarkable adoption of the service since 2009, when Pew first asked about the site, when only 9 percent reported using it.

2. Public is the new private on Twitter

The majority of teen Facebook users have their accounts set to private, but not so on Twitter. Some 64 percent of teens have Twitter accounts set to public so anyone can read their tweets, with 24 percent setting their accounts to private. Perhaps of most concern, 12 percent reported they didn’t know whether their tweets were public or private.

3. Teens are tired of Facebook, but they’re still using it

The media has been reporting teens abandoning Facebook for years now, but the Pew report finds that like a lot of adults, teens are frusterated by Facebook but stay on the platform because of the integral social role it still plays. The report explains: They dislike the increasing number of adults on the site, get annoyed when their Facebook friends share inane details, and are drained by the “drama” that they say is portrayed frequently on the site. The stress of needing to manage their reputation on Facebook also contributes to the lack of enthusiasm.” Yet 94 percent of them still use the site.

4. Tumblr numbers still aren’t very high

Yahoo might have liked the younger audience on Tumblr when it decided to acquire the site, but teen use of Tumblr is still pretty low. Only five percent reported using the site in 2012, although that’s up from 2 percent in 2011, a decent jump.

5. The subtweet goes mainstream

You heard it here first: 58 percent of teens are making inside inside jokes or sharing “cloaked messages” on social media.

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While buying Tumblr isn’t necessarily a bad deal for the two companies, as my colleague Mathew Ingram wrote, there’s another photo site out there that might have been an even better deal: Pinterest.

In many ways, Pinterest is also building a mobile-friendly photo site just like Tumblr, but Pinterest is also in the midst of constructing the underpinnings for a potentially much more lucrative native revenue experience. Pinterest is oriented around commerce and consumers craving particular items. That’s good for business.

No, buying Pinterest wouldn’t help Yahoo discover its inner tween. It’s a well-known fact that Pinterest is populated mainly by adult women — not exactly the demographic Yahoo needs to attract. And no, considering Pinterest’s valuation as of its last funding round, such an acquisition probably wouldn’t have come cheap. Acquiring the company would require a much bigger departure from Yahoo’s current mass-market advertising into the world of e-commerce and affliate links. It could be a harder sell to the company’s investors, and a bigger transition for everyone.

But if Yahoo is looking to shell out the big bucks for a site with viral growth, visuals to compete with Facebook, and a devoted community of users, Pinterest might have been the better choice. According to a Pew report in December, out of all online adults (which is basically anyone with an internet connection), just six percent of those people visited Tumblr on a regular basis, compared with 13 percent on Instagram (which isn’t exactly for sale), and 15 percent on Pinterest — only Twitter comes in at 16 percent ahead of the others and behind behemoth Facebook at 67 percent.

Less than a year out of beta, Pinterest is a dominant force on the web; a place where women of all ages collect photos of things that inspire them or things that they want to remember or create. For many, it’s a digital wish-list. And because of that, Pinterest sends huge amounts of traffic to online retailers. To be the intermediary between the people and the stores is a good place to be — you’re a crucial link that drives the sales, without any of the hassle of shipping or orders or user acquisitions that come with e-commerce.

Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann at the company’s new offices in San Francisco.

Pinterest has no business model in place right now — the site is free to join and for brands to integrate with — but that’s just right now, and it likely won’t last. The company just announced yesterday that it is starting to connect photos of items back to the brands who sell them, and it’s not hard to image how this could play out.

Tumblr does have a business model right now based on ads, and it just started rolling them out on mobile users in April. But the company has been reportedly burning through cash and not yet making a lot of revenue, hoping to bring in $100 million this year. But people are usually pretty unhappy about a free product suddenly peppering them with ads — especially if those ads are dropped into a feed that users have created (just ask anyone how they feel about Facebook ads.) CEO David Karp said at our paidContent event just last month that he wants advertising on the site to be native and unobstrusive.

“We focused on higher up in the funnel, the type of advertising that creates intent,” Karp told us in April. “It gives room for the most creative advertisers to create their best work. I think we’ve started to prove it, and see really good examples of it.”

But that’s a hard nut to crack.

Suddenly, the possible Pinterest model of taking a cut on sales and traffic resulting from users creating digital shopping lists looks a lot less disruptive to the core experience, and potentially more lucrative, than trying to solve mobile display ads for the Tumblr feed. Making money off traffic and sales wouldn’t disrupt Pinterest’s core product, and would generally fit in with the company’s existing user experience, just as promoted tweets are fitting with Twitter’s on both desktop and mobile (a profitable venture so far estimated to bring Twitter $528 million in ad revenue this year.)

So no, buying Pinterest wouldn’t make Yahoo all that hip. But buying the site that has potential to become a strong force in modern, social retail? Seems like a good bet — especially since teens might leave you once Mom joins and you become mainstream.

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Of course, as Om and others have already mentioned, there’s no guarantee this deal will actually be consummated: it could fall apart on valuation, as so many deals do — or Facebook could swoop in with a much higher offer and snatch Tumblr out of Yahoo’s clutches, the same way it did when it stole Instagram away from Twitter last year for close to $1 billion.

Update: According to the Wall Street Journal, the Yahoo board of directors has approved a $1.1-billion all-cash bid to acquire Tumblr.

It makes Yahoo look desperate — because it is

Even if the deal does get done, one of the risks for Mayer and Yahoo is that the company could look desperate by paying more than $1 billion for a site that had revenues of less than $15 million last year (although CEO David Karp has said that figure should hit $100 million this year). That’s an almost bubble-like multiple for a company, and there will likely be plenty of criticism from investors who believe that $1 billion could be better spent elsewhere — in other words, on businesses that would make Yahoo a better return.

But the painful fact is that Yahoo doesn’t just look desperate — in many ways it is desperate. Mayer has made some changes since she took over the ailing former web portal, including the acquisition of Summly and a number of other mobile-focused startups and services, but the company still needs to make some aggressive moves if it is going to jump-start any growth at all. And since Yahoo has about $4 billion in cash on hand, it can arguably afford to make a big bet.

Yahoo buying Tumblr makes sense. Tumblr is only big, cool, newish social platform that Yahoo can afford.—
Henry Blodget (@hblodget) May 17, 2013

For Yahoo, the addition of Tumblr would do a number of things: because of the size and profile of the deal, it would make a major statement about Mayer’s intention to do whatever it takes to revitalize the company, and it would also send a signal to Facebook and Google — and even Apple — that Yahoo is a potential force to be reckoned with when it comes to potential acquisitions. Is doing that worth $1 billion? That’s for Yahoo’s investors and board of directors to decide.

Just as important, it would inject some much-needed life and energy into the somewhat stale lineup of content that the company currently relies on, which caters more to the over-50 set than it does to anyone in the much-desired 18 to 25 demographic. More than any other network, Tumblr is the platform of choice for media-obsessed teens and 20-somethings, who spend massive amounts of time sharing photos and videos and animated GIFs on the site — an engine of potential value that Yahoo desperately needs.

Tumblr gets a massive exit

This doesn’t come without its own risks, of course: As a number of observers have noted, Tumblr’s content contains a large quantity of not only mature or arguably offensive content but outright pornography, which many argue is the source of its massive traffic numbers. How Yahoo (or Facebook for that matter) would deal with this kind of content remains to be seen.

3 q's for Yahoo: 1) Can you convert Tumblr users to Yahoo products? 2) Can you monetize Tumblr PVs? 3) What to do w/ all that Tumblr porn?—
Mark Zohar (@markzohar) May 18, 2013

For Tumblr, meanwhile, being acquired would solve a number of problems — the main one being that the company has gone well beyond the “we’re a startup so we don’t really have to make money” stage, and is facing increasing pressure from the investors who have given CEO David Karp more than $125 million in venture financing, an investment that values the company at about $800 million. Accepting a giant check from Yahoo would take care of that problem in one fell swoop, especially if it was all in cash.

With a major company like Yahoo as a partner, Tumblr could connect its massive audience of users to the firehose of ads and other monetization methods the giant web portal has, and potentially generate much more revenue than it could have by itself. The only lingering question at that point is whether Tumblr fans decide that Yahoo is poisoning the well of social content and community on the site, and decide to flee for greener pastures. In other words, does Yahoo make Tumblr into YouTube — a successful standalone network that can grow and prosper on its own — or does it become MySpace?

The only scenario where a Yahoo-Tumblr combo works is if Yahoo keeps Tumblr separate in the same way Google managed YouTube.—
Mark Birch (@marksbirch) May 18, 2013

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Shutterstock / ollyy and Albert Chau

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Case in point: Yahoo Weather, which rolled out recently, already has what Onavo CEO Guy Rosen calls an “unprecedented” 3 percent market share among U.S. iPhone owners. That’s about 1.5 million users total which makes it the 91st most popular iPhone app three weeks after release, according to Onavo Insights data. That’s very good for a new app, Rosen said in an interview.

Other Yahoo mobile apps including Yahoo Messenger and the Yahoo app are also doing well. “In general, what we found is that although Yahoo has been quiet on mobile, when we look at the top apps, we see quite a few up there. They have a decent footprint.”

According to Onavo stats, the Yahoo app is the most popular of the company’s suite and among the most popular in the App Store overall. In the past three months, active usage has risen to 9.02 percent from  6.5 percent (or to 4.5 million active users from 3.2 million active users.) Not too shabby.

How does Onavo get to these numbers? It uses data gleaned from its free iPhone (and now Android) apps including Onavo Extend, which compresses data flowing into and out of your phone; Onavo Counts, which watches how much time you actually spend using a given app; and Onavo Protect, which scans traffic flowing into your phone for malware. Then it aggregates that data (minus the personally identifiable bits) and runs statistics to suss out usage patterns. That data forms the core of reports that the company then sells to app developers.

This data is far more useful to app makers than app store download figures because it shows actual engagement. If your app is the mobile equivalent of shelfware, it’s helpful to know that.

Rosen said “millions” of people use Onavo’s iPhone apps but would not specify further. “We use a panel methodology with our user base as the sample and apply statistical methodologies to make sure it’s valid,” he said in an interview.

The current app stats do not yet factor in Onavo’s Android users, although they will be incorporated in time.

Note: This story was updated at 12:38 p.m. PDT with a new chart on Yahoo app usage growth and additional data on that usage.

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Photo courtesy: Leffot

I don’t know James, but my sense from reading his post is that he approaches design through a visual lens. Unlike him, I am not a designer and so my way of thinking about design is influenced by not mere visual aspects, but also how things are constructed. I don’t just love the shoes because of how they look — though that matters — but I also look at where the leather comes from, how it is stitched together and what kind of craftsmanship has gone into it. From shoe trees to little patterns on the toe to the packaging to the font on the label, all of those little things add up to the design aesthetic.

And that way of thinking about the design aesthetic extends to other things, including website design. Yes, fonts matter, and the layouts matter, but so does the relative relationship to the kind of content, the speed of the web service and even the screen size and how it all correlates to me.

So, using that lens, when I looked at Google+ and its new design, what I saw was that it was less social in the “Facebook sort of a way.” And by that I mean: it’s less about people, likes and shares being the primary action drivers on the page. Instead, I saw a design aesthetic defined by data and machines inferring relationships, the importance of content and the relative weight of all the elements on the page. The new super hashtag is a good example of what I am talking about — it surfaces a lot more information on those specific topics — with very little to do with social relationships.

As I pointed out in my post (and also on my post about Google Maps’ redesign,) we have moved into the world of data-informed applications and design too has to adapt to this reality. So, while there might be elements on the page might overlap on few occasions, the departure in the core philosophies that is reflected in the overall aesthetic is pretty clear to my eye. And as far as I can tell, that aesthetic is all about a philosophy and how it relates to senses.

Google has always been about inferring and serving up information. Facebook is about implicit actions. The new Google+ design is an extension of that thinking. And as Vic Gundotra, Google’s Senior Vice President of Google+ said: “We have put Google in Google+.”

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Before Google’s senior vice president, Vic Gundotra announced the new Google+ Wednesday at Google’s annual developer conference, Google I/O, I sat down with Fred Gilbert who heads up design for Google+, who explained how the company arrived at this new, improved look; I see it as a hybrid of a stream and Pinterest-style cards that doesn’t look awkward and ungainly.

It is a responsive design and with a click you switch how you want to see your content — as a stream or as these tiles, Gilbert pointed out. A lot of the new design actually takes a lot of cues from the current mobile versions of Google+, which are actually more advanced compared to the desktop version. At first blush this looks like a unification of mobile and desktop, but there are changes that are visible only on Google’s Chrome browser.

Fred Gilbert, lead designer for the new Google+

Gilbert, who has worked for Google for over five years, explained that a lot of the new design has been shaped by how the web has changed. He pointed out that we are sharing more things more often and as a result the social web is getting busier. You can say that again!

“What I saw was a chance to make people and the content they share the star,” Gilbert said. “Everything else just fades into the background.”

Flat design for a busy world

The design of the new Google+ is muted and flat. The colors are actually quite neutral, allowing mostly the content to shine brighter. “Flatter design keeps the distraction away,” Gilbert said. This new philosophy is reflected in this new version of Google+, which is marked by simplicity and fewer distractions. For instance, unless you are ready to engage with a piece of content, the links appear as regular text, without the distraction of the blue link. Both the left and right sidebar and menus disappear, sliding in and out as needed.

Google has come up with a unique twist on the #hashtag concept and is using it as a way to surface contextual information on the new Google+ service. The new design also liberally uses the concept of cards (that first showed up on Google Now). Hover over an item, and on the back side of the card you get more information and related links and action items.

Gilbert explained that when Google started working on the new look, the idea was to take a lot of information and show it in as simple a manner, giving the eye the visual cues to understand the importance of content. Bigger photos, for instance are indicative of their importance. Photos become bigger based on analysis of past relationships to the people and the content and their ensuing interactions, Gilbert explained.

Data, Design, Experience

Underlying these visual cues are a lot of data analytics. This data-informed design is actually a clever approach and the wave of the data-informed design. Gilbert said that usually when companies undertake a redesign of their website, it is based on some kind of data they have collected over a period of time. For Google+, data is informing the design, except at a much faster speed and is hyper-personalized based on who you really are. “Data and design have to be used together to tailor experiences,” said Gilbert.

We’ll take a close look at how data is informing design at our RoadMap event in November in San Francisco. If you sign up here you can get first access to tickets that will go on sale this Summer.

While Google still is a few years away from developing the human quotient of Apple, the new Google+ shows that the company is thinking correctly about its design identity, not forgetting that its core competency is its infrastructure: its ability to crunch large sets of data cheaply and quickly and then deliver them at blazing speed to our browsers.

The biggest challenge for Google is that Google+ doesn’t really feel like a social network like Facebook or Twitter. Instead it is something that was launched because of a degree of fear and a dash of hubris. It was a social network that Larry wanted, not you and I.

However, it has slowly evolved and has found some fanatical users such as photographer Trey Ratcliff, blogger Robert Scoble and our very own Janko Roettgers, who has turned to Google+ to build a community for his Cord Cutters show and podcasts. Google needs accidental visitors such as me to become active participants. I think the new design will help.

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This idea has come up before, but I was reminded of it when I read a Nieman Journalism Lab post about some research being done by Lee Humphreys, looking at the way that communication — and particularly personal communication, through letters and diaries and other pre-digital tools of expression. Although this doesn’t seem to have much to do with how we use ultra-modern services like Twitter or Facebook, there is a lot more to it than you might think.

Media has always been personal and social

As Humphreys describes it, her research shows that if you look at human communication over a longer period than just the past generation or two, it becomes obvious that one-way, broadcast-style “mass media” isn’t the norm at all — instead, the norm is interpersonal or multi-directional communication that shares a lot more with social media such as blogs, Twitter and Facebook. Rather than creating a new communication style, we are actually returning to one.

“Humphreys said one of the early conclusions from her research is the possibility that the mass media of the 20th century was in fact a blip, a historical aberration, and that, through platforms like Twitter, we are gradually returning to a communication network that indulges, without guilt, the individual’s desire to record his existence.”

For example, Humphreys says that the idea of diaries or journals as private things — which their owners hide underneath a mattress or keep in a secret place under lock and key — is a fairly new one. As recently as the late 19th century, it was common for people to read each other’s journals as a way of catching up with what they had been doing, and in many cases this was done with the author of the journal taking part in the discussion. In that sense, journals were a mix of private and public, in much the same way that social media is.

Although the Nieman Lab post doesn’t mention it, there was also the idea of a “commonplace book,” which was a kind of paper version of a blog, a place where people would keep snatches of text or ideas that they came across, and then share that with others. Famous writers such as John Milton and Ralph Waldo Emerson kept commonplace books, and the phenomenon is seen by many as a prelude to what would become the “remix culture” of today.

The era of mass media is over

The idea that mass media was a kind of historical accident has been raised by others as well, including Tom Standage of The Economist — both in his upcoming book, called “Writing on the Wall,” and in a series of pieces in the magazine about the nature of digital media. The latter described how the interconnected qualities of social media and “networked journalism” mirrored the way that media used to function before newspapers were invented, when the local tavern or coffee house was the center of the information ecosystem. The title of his book, Standage says, also refers to:

“The ominous implications of the rebirth of social media for mass-media companies that arose in the industrial era, predicated on the high cost of delivering information to large audiences. The conclusion of the book is that the mass-media era was a historical anomaly… indeed, it might better be termed the ‘mass-media parenthesis.’”

If this is in fact what we are experiencing — that is, the unbundling or dismantling of a mass-media infrastructure that was constructed to serve the needs of readers (and advertisers) at a specific time in history — then what can we expect? Among other things, probably further downsizing and layoffs and bankruptcies of media companies whose size and cost structure and print focus no longer corresponds to the needs of the marketplace.

And on the positive side, we are also likely to see the growth of new entities that take advantage of the networked, social and smaller-scale nature of the media ecosystem — startups like Circa, for example, or algorithmic players like Prismatic, along with larger entities like The Huffington Post and BuzzFeed. In a very real sense, it is both the best of times and the worst of times.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Shutterstock / Feng Yu and Flickr user Rosaura Ochoa

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Also, if you are in the Bay Area, we are hosting a BitCoin meet up in San Jose, Calif. on May 16 at 6 p.m. Details are here.

Reuters said that Musk departed because the group funded ads for senators vocalizing support for the oil pipeline, the Keystone pipeline, and oil drilling in Alaska. Think Progress reported last month that Fwd.us has spent a considerable amount of money on these anti-environmental ads. Various environmental groups have been protesting the ad funding.

Musk is the CEO of electric car company Tesla Motors, and the chairman of solar installer SolarCity. Sacks is the founder of Yammer, which was sold to Microsoft last year. Other members of Fwd.us include Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer, Kleiner Perkins’ John Doerr, LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman, Dropbox’s Drew Houston and many others including Facebook alumni.

Our own Om Malik weighed in on Fwd.us last month, and took issue to its angle, not necessarily to its fossil fuel ad funding:

If Mark and others really cared deeply about immigration reform on a holistic level then the conversation would involve a whole lot of other people — members of non-engineering and non-technology corps. So, no, I don’t buy that just because an immigrant works on an algorithm make her more important. I know, because I am one. Perhaps FWD.us and Zuckerberg should start actually learning about the whole and real problem: a society disrupted in connected age.

Updated at 1:45 PM PST, on May 13, to correct that eBay’s CEO John Donahoe was not originally a member of FWD.us, and was incorrectly listed on Credo’s petition calling for tech leaders to leave the group, as well as incorrectly reported on various media sites.

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