Remember when Qurora was going to be bigger than Twitter? Technically, culturally life changing? Well, that was a few months ago.

What is Quora? It was billed as a continually improving collection of questions and answers created, edited, and organized by everyone who uses it. So, basically Yahoo answers.

Buzz around Quora spiked in January, then fell sharply right back to where it was.

Quora buzz

Quora experienced a slight resurgence in chatter this week, but only because of a partial failure at Amazon Web Services’ cloud-computing infrastructure that brought down Quora.com.

Quora sentiment

Sentiment around Quora is at its most negative point currently thanks to the Amazon web services failure.

Do you use Quora? What are your thoughts?

Amazon announced plans this week to launch library lending for Kindle books, from over 11,000 libraries in the U.S. Users will be able to check out a Kindle book from a local library and start reading on any Kindle device or Kindle app. In addition to checking out the ebooks electronically, Amazon is enabling users to highlight and add margin notes to Kindle books, which will not show up when the next patron checks out the book, but will if you check the book out again or buy it.

We measured chatter around Kindle or Amazon mentions within Library conversations.

Amazon or Kindle mentions within Library conversations

Amazon or Kindle was mentioned within 25% of all library conversations the day of the announcement. Will Amazon, Kindle and ebooks completely alter the current public library system?

Forbes reported that Best Buy plans to open hundreds of smaller mobile stores and expand online and in China in an effort to be more competitive as consumers increasingly shop online.

The largest U.S. electronics retailer plans to shrink square footage at big-box stores by 10 percent over the next three to five years.

How does chatter around Best Buy compare to online shopping leader Amazon?

Best Buy vs. Amazon (past month)

Chatter around Best Buy pales in comparison to Amazon.

How often does the word ‘online’ appear in shopping conversations?

Since January 2010, the word “online” has appeared in an increasing number of conversations around shopping. Will Blockbuster’s latest move help the company adapt, or will the company eventually become an obsolete middle man?

Fast Company reported today that LivingSocial’s traffic surged 80% last week — thanks to its partnership with Amazon — while Groupon’s plummeted 20%.

A few weeks ago, Groupon.com was the darling of the deal-a-day market, rejecting a $6 billion acquisition offer by Google and raising a record-breaking $950 million in venture capital. Last week, LivingSocial announced a $175 million investment from Amazon, and created instant buzz offering a huge discount that attracted millions of users.

We used Social Radar to analyze online conversations around Groupon and LivingSocial.

Groupon vs. LivingSocial chatter trend

Chatter around LivingSocial spiked above Groupon following the Amazon investment and deal announcement, but immediately fell back below Groupon.

Groupon vs. LivingSocial chatter total

Total chatter around Groupon was significantly higher than LivingSocial over the past month.

Groupon vs. LivingSocial sentiment

Conversations around LivingSocial were 88% positive over the past two weeks, while Groupon conversations were only 78% positive.

In Buzz 10, we use Social Radar to determine the 10 most buzzed about topics across the web via Twitter, blogs, discussion boards, media, and social networks. For this Buzz 10, we analyzed chatter around Time Magazine’s 50 Best Websites of 2010, Alexa Rankings, and other popular websites to determine the top 10 most talked about websites in 2010.

10. Flickr

The popular image hosting and video hosting website, web services suite, and online community is widely used by bloggers to host images that they embed in blogs and social media.

9. WordPress

WordPress is an open source Content Management System (CMS), often used as a blog publishing application. It has many features including a plug-in architecture and a template system and is used by over 13% of the 1,000,000 biggest websites.

8. MSN

MSN (originally The Microsoft Network) is a collection of Internet sites and services provided by Microsoft.

7. Yahoo!

Yahoo! is best known for its web portal, search engine, Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! News, advertising, online mapping, video sharing, and social media websites and services.

6. Amazon

Amazon.com is America’s largest online retailer.

5. Tumblr

Tumblr is a microblogging platform that allows users to post text, images, videos, links, quotes and audio to their tumblelog, a short-form blog. Users can follow other users, or choose to make their tumblelog private. The service emphasizes ease of use.

4. Facebook

With more than 500 million active users, a blockbuster movie and millions of links, photos, comments, wall posts and ‘likes’ happening every day, 2010 was a big year for the social network service.

3. Google

Google continues to expand on its Internet-based services, which now include real-time search.

2. YouTube

YouTube users have uploaded more than 13 million hours of video content to its servers in the last 12 months, resulting in more than 700 billion YouTube video views — which means that YouTube’s users have uploaded 850,000 minutes of video and watched 1.9 billion videos per day in the past year.

1. Twitter

Twitter grew exponentially in 2010 thanks to support from major celebrities and the masses, enabling users to follow and connect based on common interests. Twitter enables its users to send and read messages called tweets, text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the user’s profile page. Tweets are publicly visible by default, however senders can restrict message delivery to their followers. News sources from ESPN to TMZ to CNN regularly rely on tweets during news broadcasts.

Given the current economic conditions, along with the rise of sites like Groupon, deals are all the rage. We used Social Radar to run analysis around Black Friday and Cyber Monday chatter, as well as 25 of the top retailers promoting deals online.

Amazon jumped three spots this year to take the #1 spot as the most talked about retailer, thanks to significant buzz around Black Friday deals. Target moved up one spot to #2 overall this year. Walmart fell four spots to #5 overall in 2010, after being the most talked about retailer during the same period last year. Toys R Us jumped three spots to enter the top 5. Best Buy fell one spot to #3 but remained in the top 5 this year.

Overstock.com and Barnes & Noble also made notable gains in chatter this year, jumping 14 and 10 spots respectively. CVS and Walgreen’s joined the top 20, while Newegg.com and Office Depot noticed decreases in chatter this year.

Chatter around Cyber Monday specifically was significantly higher this year versus last year.

For further analysis, we broke down the top 25 most talked about retailers before and after Black Friday and Cyber Monday to determine when the retailers generated the most chatter.

With the continued surge in social media activity, people are sharing the deals they find with their friends, which leads to increased participation and chatter.

For further information about Social Radar, visit http://infegy.com/socialradar.

The Social Radar Top 50 measures the brands with the most active Web presence based on overall online conversation volume. To create the Top 50 list, we used Social Radar to analyze millions of blog posts, news feeds, forums, social networks and Twitter posts to aggregate a list of the words and brands mentioned most frequently on the Web during all of 2008 and 2009. The list measures the number of unique individuals or sources that posted content about each brand during 2009 rather than the overall number of mentions, which would be more heavily influenced by big fans who post frequently about a specific brand.

This year has certainly been interesting. Several new brands made their way to the mainstream making our 2009 Top 50 list, such as Kindle, Amazon’s hit e-book reader, and Android, Google’s mobile OS that is spreading onto smartphones like wildfire. Interestingly, Samsung and Nokia took a big hit this year, as sexier smartphones such as iPhones and Android-powered devices from HTC and Motorola gain more attention.

The list certainly shows that 2009 was the year of Social Media. Twitter moved ahead of Google to take the number 1 spot, while Facebook and MySpace made significant leaps over big brands as well. Most video game related brands were down this year as well, including Sony, Wii, Xbox, and Nintendo. It also appears TV brands all jumped this year including Disney, MTV, Fox, BBC, CNN, ESPN, and ABC.

Download the PDF:

View the full list below, or download the PDF. For additional information about how you can analyze chatter sentiment to gauge positivity/negativity, view key words mentioned about your brand and identify key influencers, visit www.infegy.com/socialradar.

Social Radar Screenshot:

Questions or comments? Twitter me @adamcoomes.

The September 2009 Social Radar Top 50 measures the brands with the most active Web presence based on overall online conversation volume. To create the Top 50 list, we used Social Radar to analyze millions of blog posts, news feeds, forums, social networks and Twitter posts to aggregate a list of the words and brands mentioned most frequently on the Web during September 2009. The list measures the number of unique individuals or sources that posted content about each brand during September 2009 rather than the overall number of mentions, which would be more heavily influenced by big fans who post frequently about a specific brand.

Twitter falls a bit, but still takes top spot. LG’s new BL20 Chocolate helped LG jump 11 spots. NFL rises again this month as the NFL season heats up. MTV jumps 13 spots due to buzz around the MTV Video Music awards. AT&T’s announcement of MMS support on the iPhone raised AT&T’s position up 5 spots.

View the full list below, or download the PDF. For additional information about how you can analyze chatter sentiment to gauge positivity/negativity, view key words mentioned about your brand and identify key influencers, visit www.infegy.com/socialradar.

Questions or comments? Twitter me @adamcoomes.

The July 2009 Social Radar Top 50 measures the brands with the most active Web presence based on overall online conversation volume. To create the Top 50 list, we used Social Radar to analyze millions of blog posts, news feeds, forums, social networks and Twitter posts to aggregate a list of the words and brands mentioned most frequently on the Web during July 2009. The list measures the number of unique individuals or sources that posted content about each brand during July 2009 rather than the overall number of mentions, which would be more heavily influenced by big fans who post frequently about a specific brand.

Once again, Twitter holds on to the top spot. MySpace jumped 17 spots, mostly due to MySpace’s new mail service. Amazon jumped 6 spots to #16 from chatter regarding the acquisition of Zappos. eBay jumped 8 spots and Skype joined the list this month due to a legal battle that may threaten the future of Skype.

There were some other surprises this month as well. The LG Chocolate helped LG jump 11 spots. Starbucks joined the list thanks to their Free Pastry day spreading lots of chatter. BlackBerry jumped 15 spots thanks in part to rumors about the new BlackBerry Storm as well as their new app store. Nintendo, Wii, Sony, Playstation and XBox all dropped this month after buzz from the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) subsided.

View the full list below, or download the PDF. For additional information about how you can analyze chatter sentiment to gauge positivity/negativity, view key words mentioned about your brand and identify key influencers, visit www.infegy.com/socialradar.

Questions or comments? Twitter me @adamcoomes.