Twitter exists solely for people to answer the question "What are you doing?", and its users have been answering that question thousands of times per day since it launched. In an effort to find out what exactly Twitter's users are doing, I checked a sample of 500,000 tweets to see what the most common "-ing" verbs were. Listed below are my findings: the 101 most common actions and the number of times they appeared in the 500,000 messages.

Some interesting observations: "going" beats "coming", "sitting" tops "standing", "listening" outranks "talking", "downloading" wins out over "uploading", and in the feel-good story of the year, "loving" (#53) reigns supreme over "fighting" (#93).

This CSV files contains the username, number of frontpage stories, number of submitted stories, number of stories dugg, and number of profile views for the top 1,000 users on Digg.

Top 1000 Diggers as of 2007/07/04

If you'd like to be notified whenever I release a new dataset, you can subscribe to the Digg Statisical Data RSS feed, which will include only the dataset posts, or my main RSS feed, which is updated with all of my blog posts.

Everyone who requested a Pownce invite yesterday should have received one from me; if you didn't, let me know, and I'll resend it. Moreover, I've determined how to obtain an infinite number of invites, so if you still want one, let me know in the comments.

Again, here I am on Pownce. So far, I haven't found much value added in using Pownce over Twitter. Twitter may only do one thing, but it's dead-simple. Pownce does more, but the added features (sending links, sending events, sending files) clutter what should be a clean interface.

Twitter is so intuitive since its obvious use is to answer the question "What are you doing right now?" Pownce doesn't display any sort of prompt as to what you're supposed to do with it other than "Send stuff to your friends." I'd recommend that they choose a more specific motto like "Build our userbase large enough so that we can get bought out by Twitter or Jaiku."

I've got some Pownce invites; leave a comment if you want one.

If you're on Pownce, let me know so I can add you as a friend. Here I am on Pownce.

AOL News has undergone a redesign to be more "bloggy" (according to Reuters). Part of this update is that now they're featuring the top stories at Netscape.com under the "User Submitted News" in the left-hand sidebar.

I wouldn't mind that section being a little higher up on the page though, maybe replacing any of the nine (yes, nine) links to stories about Paris Hilton being released from prison...