The latest analysis from Jakob Nielsen’s UseIt focuses on “bounce rates” and getting that elusive “second click”. It’s pretty much in line with everything experts have been saying on this topic for the last couple of years: unique visitors are a bad way to measure traffic, traffic from loyal users and search engine traffic are the kind of traffic you’re aiming for, etc.

For a moment let’s step back though and look at this whole Social Media movement that is basically taking over the Web. No matter from where you look information is flowing faster than it ever has before, but unlike before, Social Media is being driven by both consumer and content producers. Unlike when Google came out with their secret sauce algorithm called PageRank where the power of popularity is no longer in the hands of content producers. PageRank, in its simplest explanation, ranks a Web site by the number of links that were pointed at it.

Some people can read instructions on how to do things and can immediately go out and do them without any problems. But others need to see things done before they fully grasp how to do them. This is fine if you know someone who can show you how to do things, but if you don’t, it’s a little harder.

So why might Verizon give up on owning its social networking and instead use a Facebook page? Here are what I see as the major advantages:

Dungeons and Dragons, the role-playing game system introduced in the 1970’s that launched a generation of lunch room gaming, is coming firmly into the 21st century with its next update.

MySpace has won a legal battle, against spammers Sanford Wallace and Walter Rines, according to an AP report. The battle ended in a $234 million judgment by a Las Angles court, ruling against some of the most notable spammers, thanks to their antics on popular social networking site MySpace, and even some massive spamming campaigns throughout the 1990s.

On the heels of yesterday’s “Data Availability” announcement from MySpace, Facebook has just announced the launch their own initiative to allow users to port their profile data to other web sites. Here’s what will be included in Facebook’s version according to a post on the company’s developer blog:

Yesterday, following a study that showed declining interest in Facebook from the social network’s developer community, we posted a poll asking if you were fed up with Facebook. The results were a fairly resounding “yes.” In our most active poll ever, only 13% of you said that you are “Not At All” fed up with the social network and are still enjoying it just as much as when you signed up.

I’ve been hearing that May 1st was RSS Awareness Day for a few weeks, although I hadn’t really been able to pin down many details. However, since Dave Winer - the godfather of RSS himself - has posted about it, I figured it would be okay to spread the word here too.

For most of us here at Mashable, the biggest, most well known application running on the Rails platform we can think of is Twitter - a tool hardly known for its stability. While this contributes to the mythology of the platform’s instability, what really propagates it is a number of things.