It’s high time for this wake-up call. It is abundantly clear by the recent outrage at Facebook that the vast majority of the Internet–the social media crowd, in particular–still doesn’t get the business of social media. Social media is not a public service. It is not funded and managed by the government. It is not a nonprofit entity, out to change the world, regardless of the profit margin.

Social media is a business, and it amazes me how much social media users are, quite frankly, acting like entitled, spoiled brats.

Reality is striking the social media space and it’s hitting hard and fast. As we all know, it’s centered on the Facebook privacy debacle, set in motion by a changed privacy policy meant to help further the business–and the continued existence–of a growing international corporation. Couple that with some bad PR on Facebook’s part and a spoiled user base, and you’ve set the stage for a crisis of poisoned Tylenol proportions. But Facebook can relax, because they’re in the right on this one. People need to wake up and smell the roses, because there’s no such thing as a free lunch.

Three things I want you to learn from this post.

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Crossposted from shamable.com, here.

Quickly reading this article on TechCrunch about the new Tweetdeck update (my absolute favorite Twitter client), one section caught my eye and got me thinking:

You can now view more photos and videos inside TweetDeck, meaning that for some users Tweetdeck is going to start being the way they interface with rich media. Clicking on links to Youtube videos will now show the video in a TweetDeck preview window. Flickr image links will also now open in a preview, along with pictures from Posterous, Mobypicture and Twitgoo. Users can also upload to Mobypicture.

In other words, heavy Tweetdeck users are going to start finding they use their browser less to upload media to Twiter [sic] apps.

My question for the Web is this: how will this affect analytics? I know that on my blog, I can detect if a person is referred to my site from a client, but how will YouTube, Flickr, and even Twitter itself calculate analytics for content that comes from the API, instead of the Web site?

Now clearly, I’m not an analytics guy, by any means. But I do know that all the talk about Twitter peaking has gotten people talking about whether Twitter is a unique case of people actually accessing the site far more from third-party clients than via the actual Web interface. Perhaps people are simply using clients now, the argument goes, so hits aren’t showing up in site analytics. I dunno, kind of makes sense to me.

So how will this affect sites like YouTube and Flickr, in particular? Now that more and more content is driven by Twitter and more and more people are using Tweetdeck, will this result in lost site traffic by those sites? If this becomes a long-term trend, how will they find a way of getting these analytics? And how will they persuade advertisers that it’s still worth it to advertise on the site? After all, if people are using a client to watch a YouTube video, they certainly aren’t seeing any of the ads on YouTube.com. Who’s going to come up with the next big thing in analytics? Looks like it might be necessary sooner, rather than later.

[techcrunch]