Madison Avenue may be raving about the potential of social networks but don’t tell Gen Yers. They don’t care. According to a new report from The Participatory Marketing Network, Gen Y consumers would abandon social networks in favor of texting and email.

Other interesting findings include:

• Gen Y consumers spend about 33 hours per month with social networks
• Gen Yers spend 31 hours with email
• Gen Yers send more than 740 text messages
• Talking on the phone, watching television and reading magazines all take a backseat to texting, emailing or social networking
• Mobile marketing efforts are also low on Gen Y preference lists

Read the full story at Biz Report.

Product development teams now face the new challenge of interpreting and acting on the vast quantities of customer information they are now capturing. Here are some new tools to help make that job easier. Thanks to Rob Tannen’s Designing for Humans.

Here’s a little background on how book publishing works.

Viral Loop: From Facebook to Twitter, How Today’s Smartest Businesses Grow Themselves. It tells the stories of the fastest growing companies in history–Skype, Hotmail, eBay, PayPal, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and many more, all of which grew virally. By amassing such huge numbers of users without spending a dime on marketing, they were able to create multimillion and in some cases billion-dollar businesses practically overnight. They did it by creating a product that its users spread for them. In other words, to use it, they had to spread it.