Today Nielsen, the venerable measurement service, shed light on the question of how online social media "buzz" relates to TV ratings. In a study done jointly with the McKinsey consultancy, the company found that within a few weeks prior to the premiere of a new television show, a 9 percent increase in social media comments correlates to a 1 percent increase in ratings among people aged 18 to 34, who are the most active social networkers. Later in the TV season, it takes a 14 percent increase in buzz to correspond to a one percent increase in ratings. This correlation is statistically significant, and the analysis is the first to make such a link, according to Radha Subramanyam, Nielsen's senior vice president of media analytics and Nielsen and NM Incite, the joint venture between Nielsen and McKinsey.

Subramanyam doesn't claim that the buzz actually causes the ratings boost. But it does suggest something else important: research on social media activity is on its way to producing a reliable metric for real-world trends and behaviors. I'll go out on a limb and say that what Nielsen did was show that, eventually, it might become possible for the right measurement and analysis of social-media comments to serve as a proxy for today's widely-accepted measures on all sorts of things, including TV viewership, sales, and even voting behavior.

The caveats are several, of course. In the television context, for example, men over 50 aren't very likely to tweet about Andy Rooney's retirement and the future of 60 Minutes. (You're more likely to get good data on Glee or Jersey Shore.) But the trend is toward more, not less, social media engagement. And two-screen behavior—in which people use laptops or smart phones while also watching TV—is on the rise. As Subramanyam points out: "As television becomes more digital—in the form of sharable video clips or articles about a show's premiere, for example—social media will continue to play an increasingly important role in how consumers discover and engage with various forms of content, including TV."

The causation question came up when I was reporting our upcoming feature, posting October 18, on Bluefin Labs, a startup company in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that is trying to precisely pin social media comments to the TV shows and advertisements that provoke them. (The company leaves it to others, such as Nielsen, to measure viewership.) "We'd love to know the connection between social media and ratings," Gayle Weiswasser, the vice president of social media communications for Discovery Communications (which owns Discovery Channel and several others), told me. "Is there a causative relationship? Or are they simply correlated?" She will have to wait awhile longer for that answer; Nielsen and others are plugging away. But with more data being generated all the time, and more companies discovering business models in producing analytics, the tools for figuring this out are getting sharper.

Details on the study's findings and methodology can be found here.

A screenshot shows a Diaspora user's homepage. Credit: Diaspora

A privacy-focused rival to Facebook, called Diaspora, released its project code last week, providing a glimpse of how it will look and function. The site closely resembles Facebook, but there's a key difference: users store and control all their own data.

Diaspora operates as a decentralized network. This means that users' data--photos, friend lists, statuses, etc.--are hosted on their own computers, or on servers they have access to, which are called "seeds". Diaspora lets users connect directly to other "seeds," and choose what data they want to share, and with whom, to build their social network. Data transferred over Diaspora will be encrypted (except for photos, for now).

The project was launched in April by four NYU students who obtained around $200,000 in funding in June via the fundraising program Kickstarter.

Diaspora may just be a welcome alternative to Facebook for many people. This year Facebook made a succession of a backlash from users.

But first Diaspora will need to address some of the security flaws hackers have found in the system. The alpha release is slated for October, and is expected to include Facebook integration, allowing unhappy users to easily jump ship.

Twitter founder Evan Williams announced a new platform for the popular microblogging service during a keynote interview today at South By Southwest Interactive (SXSWi). The new platform, called @Anywhere, allows websites to integrate Twitter more deeply.

The platform is launching with a number of media partners, including The New York Times, Digg, The Huffington Post, and Bing. Williams said it will allow users to, for example, discover and follow a writer's Twitter account simply by hovering over a byline in a news article, or to follow a band after finding its name in the text of an article.

The idea of the platform, Williams said, is to reduce the friction that prevents more engagement. If the platform is adopted, he said, it "should result in more followers for a site," as well as more community interaction. He referred to the platform as an "@" platform rather than an "app" platform.

Williams was thin on details, despite some prodding during the keynote interview. In some respects, this seemed to be because the platform is designed to be flexible and he's not yet sure how sites will use it. I did, however, wish that he would use more than 140 characters to describe how it was intended to be used.