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The world over is reacting to the fact that Facebook has now put a dollar value on 845 million users’ personal data. Zuckerberg had something to say about it, too. About three hours after the IPO dropped, he posted a revealing photo to his Facebook page.

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The status update has more than 70,000 “likes” and 6127 shares, but only 128 comments. Most of them are congratulatory: “Like!” says Larry Chiang, emphatically. “Keep the vision and stay thirsty my friend! Congrats!” writes Ken Walden. Zuck is absent from the entire comment thread.

There’s a common, understood practice in the Facebook culture. If a user gets feedback on a status update, they take a few minutes to go through and “like” some of the comments that their friends left. It shows recognition and approval of the comment, producing a feeling of momentary happiness in the user. It’s even better than a smiley-face approval.

Zuck didn’t “like” any of the comments that anyone posted. Notably, KuoChuan Chang, a user in Taipei, Taiwan, went through and liked quite a few of the comments that other Facebookers left Mark. Chang even shared the “Stay Focused & Keep Shipping” photo to his own page. For added emphasis, he decided to “like” it, too.

“Personal relationships are the fundamental unit of our society,” Zuckerberg writes in his IPO letter. “Relationships are how we discover new ideas, understand our world and ultimately derive long-term happiness.”

Zuckerberg is the man (er, boy) behind the technological side of Facebook. But when it comes to making “friends,” he does not participate in the culture of Facebook that he helped create.

Beast photo via Zuckerberg’s Facebook profile.

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Sharaholic looked at two metrics: social shares and traffic. For some, getting the highest number of shares is the goal; for others, increased traffic is where it’s at. Please remember that this data all comes from Sharaholic, so it’s specific to those users, though it’s possible to infer more from the results.

Thursday beats every other day. Why? People are probably bored at work, trolling about on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ (and Orkut?), sharing to their hearts’ desire. Sharaholic’s data shows that 31%, or more than a third of the top 100 social share days, were Thursdays. The best day for pageviews, however, is not Thursday. In fact, it’s Monday. According to Sharaholic’s data, Monday captures 43% of the top 100 pageview days in 2011.

As most blogs know, the best time of day for social shares is between 8am and 12pm ET. Sharaholic’s data confirms this, showing that the most shares occur at 9am ET, moments before East coasters step into their offices to start the workday. Traffic declines throughout the day, spiking back up again around 9pm, and then slowly tapering off. Evidently, the best time of day to blog for pageviews is also 9am ET.

Image via UrbanHomesPDX.com.

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A thoughtful New York Times article published yesterday speaks to an eerie new trend: In the digital era, teenagers in love want to share their most intimate secrets, ideas and, of course, their Facebook accounts. They leave virtual residue on each others’ Facebook walls, they send Facebook messages, they text each other and video chat. And they even share their passwords with each other.

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A 2011 Pew Internet and American Life Project study revealed that 30% of all teen Internet users shared a password with a friend or significant other. Of that percentage, 38% of girls shared a password with a friend or significant other versus only 23% of boys. Teens in the 14-17 age group were more likely to share passwords than those in the 12-13 age group.

Why are teenagers doing something so risky? To feel close. As with sex, teens engaging in this type of behavior aren’t thinking about the potentially huge consequences. After a break-up, an angry ex could hack into the other person’s account and steal their identity for a period of time. Or worse yet, one ex could damage the other person’s online reputation. How easy would it be for an angry teenager to log-in to their ex’s Facebook profile, spam a bunch of friends and post intimate secrets about their relationship? This is the other downside to not changing one’s password often enough. According to the same Pew survey, however, only 17% of teenagers set their profiles to public; so even if this were to happen, at least the information would only broadcast out to a network of friends.

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Android rose to the top of the smartphone heap by sheer volume. It has a plethora of original equipment manufacturers pumping out new devices every week that are distributed across the four major U.S. mobile carriers along varying price points. Why has Apple caught up? Well, because it now does that too.

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For the most of the life of the iPhone, what was its major limiting factor? Primarily, the fact that it was only available at AT&T. In March of 2011, the iPhone 4 came to Verizon and the world seemingly rejoiced. While Verizon iPhone sales have been solid, they have not been quite as killer as Apple or the pundits had originally thought. People have expensive contracts and early termination fees to contend with and the notion of jumping from one carrier to another does not make sense for a lot of consumers.

Those AT&T contracts are starting to expire. That does not mean users are dropping the nation’s second largest cellular operator in droves, but freedom of choice has finally be awarded to would-be iPhone buyers. There are also a variety of price points available. The iPhone 3GS is now free from AT&T on a contract. The iPhone 4 is $99 on Verizon and AT&T with a contract while the iPhone 4S is available across AT&T, Verizon and Sprint for $199. That makes the iPhone available to more than 260 million Americans whereas it used to only be available to the 95-100 million or so on AT&T.

Market depth plus price point … more smartphone sales. It should come as no surprise and we have been curious to see these numbers since Apple made the announcement of the 4S last October. It is also no surprise that the 4S is leading the charge. Of new iPhone buyers, 57% chose the 4S.

Of all smartphone owners (not just recent acquirers) that Nielsen surveyed, 46.3% are Android owners. Apple has risen several points in the overall market share to 30%. Research In Motion’s BlackBerry has dropped precipitously in these types of surveys, going from near 22% at this time last year to 6% of new buyers in Q4. Windows Phone and Windows Mobile (which indeed still exists) made up for 3.8% of new users and 5.9% overall in Nielsen’s numbers with Windows Mobile making up for 4.6% of that.

The nature of the smartphone market is cyclical. Apple made its big push with iOS 5 and the iPhone 4S in the fall. The company is likely to do that again this year with a late season rollout of the iPhone 5. Meanwhile, it is time for Android to reassert itself as version 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich makes its way to new devices across carriers. The seesaw battle will continue and when we see Nielsen’s numbers for Q1 or Q2, the tone of this story might be quite different.

It is not like Android is losing much steam. Of recent acquirers, more than half chose Android at 51.7% in Q4. The growth of Android and Apple comes to the detriment of, well, everybody else, but especially RIM. Of all smartphones purchased in Q4, 88.7% were either iOS or Android. That leaves several billion dollar companies such as Microsoft, RIM and to a certain extent Hewlett-Packard to battle over a very small slice of the pie.

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