Pinterest grew from 2.5% of referral traffic in December to 3.6% of the referrals in January. That’s impressive growth from just owning .17% of the traffic back in July.

The report goes on to discuss the fact that YouTube did actually grow for the month as well, and it addressed that MySpace even still holds a good size of the market of referrals.

Full report here.

The company itself is preparing to raise $10 billion this year, according to reports, to push the company’s public value to $100 billion. More than Disney ($61 billion), Amazon ($88.3 billion) and McDonald’s ($95.6 billion).

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The source also includes an infographic that breaks down comparable IPOs both in cost and in industry to show how momentous this will be. It also breaks down owners by percentage in terms of who will gain what when the time comes.

By folding more than 60 product-specific privacy policies into our main Google one, we’re explaining our privacy commitments to users of those products in 85% fewer words.

They continue on to point out the important things that are NOT changing. You still won’t have to be signed into any Google accounts in order to use them. You can search whatever you want on any of their services without ever logging in so that the searches will never be attached to your account. They still will never sell the data they collect when you are logged in.

These changes will still go into effect on March 1st. Feel free to read more about this at the Google Public Policy Blog.

“Kindle Fire has staked out an important market position due to its loyal Amazon customer base and attractive (low) device pricing,” Rohan said in a note to clients. “We believe the lower hardware price will correlate with high e-book and video content attach rates.”

Since Amazon was taking the gamble of selling the device low, hoping to make the money back in eBook and other digital sales, these reports are great news for the business. Amazon knows that whatever loss they may incur from selling the Kindle Fire at such a low price, they can make up continually with digital sales. It’s hard to even quantify a gain that has no solid end-date. People will keep buying eBooks and movies for use on the Kindle Fire, long after they make money back from any possible loss from the initial device purchase.

Starting today, we give ourselves the ability to reactively withhold content from users in a specific country — while keeping it available in the rest of the world. We have also built in a way to communicate transparently to users when content is withheld, and why.

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While this is – of course – running into criticism as it relates to free speech, many do think that Twitter chose the best option available to them.

Twitter would be banned outright in many countries if it did not agree to restrict Tweets, said Cynthia Wong of the Center for Technology & Democracy.

“The question is: What’s best for freedom of speech?” Wong said. “If Twitter was completely blocked from certain countries, is that really better? It looks like Twitter has done a good job in thinking through how to mitigate the human rights harm in complying with local law.”

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Considering how big of a role Twitter has played in past civic uprisings globally, it seems obvious they’re still try to be a tool for the people and a voice to those silenced when they can. We’ll see how well it plays out when it’s first put to use.

Source: Flickr

This new high-resolution photo of earth was taken by NASA’s new satellite: Suomi NPP.

A ‘Blue Marble’ image of the Earth taken from the VIIRS instrument aboard NASA’s most recently launched Earth-observing satellite – Suomi NPP. This composite image uses a number of swaths of the Earth’s surface taken on January 4, 2012. The NPP satellite was renamed ‘Suomi NPP’ on January 24, 2012 to honor the late Verner E. Suomi of the University of Wisconsin.

Just take a moment an pan across the high-res image and see the exquisite detail the image renders.

So what does this mean for the rest of the tablet market?

According to this Op-Ed it looks like the market may be dividing in half with iPad taking the majority of the “higher end” tablet sales and the Kindle Fire taking the majority in the “lower end” of the market.

The obvious conclusion, which many have predicted: The tablet market is splitting in two. The iPad continues to be the gold standard, backed by iOS and its 170,000 tablet-specific apps. But the Kindle Fire points users directly to Amazon’s popular content platforms, and many owners see its smaller size and focus on media as advantages — especially when you consider it’s $300 cheaper than the least-expensive iPad.

The real story will also be how these tablet sales reflect on associated sales for both companies. How does the sell of an iPad affect the sales of iTunes or Apps? How does the sale of the Kindle Fire affect the sales of eBooks and movies? Either way – it does seem to all point to a split market for the time being.

Google also claims that the retention and analysis of this data will help the platforms deliver the proper information to the user. “When someone is searching for the word “jaguar,” Google would have a better idea of whether the person was interested in the animal or the car.”

This type of connection between web sites is what may concern many users. People who many not want the information in their emails to be connected to themselves as a user on properties such as YouTube.

“Google’s new privacy announcement is frustrating and a little frightening,” said Common Sense Media chief executive James Steyer. “Even if the company believes that tracking users across all platforms improves their services, consumers should still have the option to opt out — especially the kids and teens who are avid users of YouTube, Gmail and Google Search.”

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This is all supposed to go into effect on March 1st. We’ll see if any adjustments are made to the changes before then.

Of course, if Facebook has not rolled this out automatically to a user’s account, they can still get it by going here and clicking “Get Timeline.” They’ll get the same 7-day grace period to edit the Facebook past before that format is used permanently. Either way, every user will be using the Timeline format eventually, adding a bit more consistency to the social platform that has been pretty divided in the recent months.

Last week, Google said that its business running graphical “display” ads – many of which are integrated alongside YouTube videos – was generating $5 billion in revenue on an annualized run rate basis.