Facebook

The Facebook IPO was a hot topic on blogs, Twitter and Facebook last week with doubts about the stock’s value exceeding bullishness on the investment.  And the topics of conversation—which ranged from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s wedding to co-founder Eduardo Saverin’s citizenship—varied by social media platform.

At two degrees of separation (friends of friends), Facebook users surveyed on average can reach 150,000 other Facebook users.

The sale of the photo networking site Instagram to Facebook for $1 billion gained attention on both blogs and Twitter last week as users were startled by the large price tag. Also, three separate media controversies kept the aftermath of the Trayvon Martin case in the news six weeks after the incident occurred.

Despite the growing importance of social media, just 9% of digital news consumers say they “very often” follow news recommendations from Facebook or Twitter on any of the three main types of digital devices (computers, smartphones or tablets).

Perhaps no topic in technology attracted more attention in 2011 than the rise of social media and its potential impact on news. “If searching for news was the most important development of the last decade, sharing news may be among the most important of the next,” we wrote in a May 2011 report analyzing online news behavior called Navigating News Online.

On blogs and Twitter, Facebook is a major and enduring topic. It has been among the top five most-discussed topics on at least one of those platforms in 39 different weeks between January 2009 and the end of January 2012.

With Facebook’s IPO filing, this special edition of the New Media Index examines the conversation about the company among bloggers and tweeters during the past three years.

A majority of adults who use Facebook interact with the website at least daily.

Far more young adults are able to identify the founder of Facebook (63%) than name the speaker of the House (21%).

With Facebook's announcement of the rollout of "Facebook Messages," we offer our data on teens' communication landscape as context for understanding the potential implications of the new feature.