While the other Republican presidential nominee candidates for 2012 have a real sameness about them, Ron Paul stands out. Whether that is because, as someone noticed on Quora, his supporters seem to like Star Trek, or for other reasons, social media like/interest data from optim.al (and their new SocialPredict data product) clearly highlights some of the differences. Click on the image to expand:

You’ll notice that Ron Paul supporters like not only Star Trek and William Shatner, but the Colbert Report, Christopher Walken and Guinness. And of course let’s not forget our trusty favorite defender-of-liberty Jack Bauer. However, there are other more real “science-y” things in there that people who like Ron Paul also like – Modern Marvels, the Science Channel, evolution and “the Universe”.

By contrast, Mitt Romney, Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich are so close to one another in terms of their audience’s interests and likes that they are almost indistinguishable in the interest graph. Rick Santorum is much closer to them but still a little less same. Zoom in on the chart as it makes for some fascinating reading.

Our team put together some global growth numbers for Facebook over the last 1,001 days, including a micro-view over the last 90 days. The part that stood out was the incredible growth coming from Brazil and India over that period. Here is the % of total growth in Facebook users coming from various countries, ordered by size, over the last 3 months:

Facebook added 39.3 million users over this period, of which:

• Brazil was the biggest growth engine with 7.2 million (18.4% of the total)
• India was the second largest with almost 5 million (13% of the total)

Brazil makes up just 2.9% of the world’s population, but made up over 18% of Facebook’s growth in this period. India has a low Internet penetration compared to its overall size: at over 1.2 billion people it makes up 18.3% of the world’s population, so the growth there is not as impressive as compared to what is going on in Brazil.

I’ve been a very interested follower of adblocking software over the years, and found the announcement by AdBlock Plus that it will let some “acceptable ads” through, intriguing. Now that this is a full-time pursuit for its creator, Wladimir Palant, not to mention another employee [blog post announcement] they are figuring out ways to make this a sustainable enterprise. Here’s an article about the acceptable ads announcement.

I plan to write in more detail about publishers and the state of ad networks, and will make some reference to this particular situation, but it is not surprising to me at all.