Socia Networks are a huge part of the internet these days.  Most of our businesses are on some combination of Facebook and Twitter, and even a few of us are on the rather somnabulistic Google+.  We want to get these networks working for us, generating leads and so on, but the only way you can market effectively is if you have data telling you what works and what doesn't.

Unfortunately, so far Social Networks have been traditionally pretty poor at providing any analytical information.  Facebook gives us graphs of likes and page views, but that's it - it's just numbers on a page at the end of the day.  It's not using the medium to convey the message very well.  Enter Google+ Ripples.  This new feature shows a 'map' of how your posts spread, to the different people who share them against the time they are shared.  

It's awesome stuff - Scott Hanselman's post sums it up pretty well - "Give the users their data. Give them analytics. Let them see how their data moves around the web and how it happened. Let them understand how the network lives and works with elegant visualizations. While you at it, animate the process. Brilliant."

The ball is definitely in Facebook and Twitter's court now.