The idea that there is a perfect time to post a tweet or Facebook update is a myth. If you’re targeting teenagers, mornings and nights might be the best times to post during the school year. During the summer? That’s a whole other story. There simply is no universal “perfect time to post”. There are, however, some best practices .

Facebook:

Saturdays are best.
12 p.m.  is the best time to share.
0.5 posts per day is the best frequency.

Twitter:

5 p.m.  is the best time to get a retweet.
1 to 4 link tweets per hour is the best frequency.
Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays are best.
6 a.m. , 12 p.m.  and 6 p.m. are the best times to tweet in terms of clicks.

It’s easy for startup founders to believe the whole world will love their products. After all, founders eat, sleep and breathe their products. The reality is that only a small portion of the population is interested in your product.

If you try to market your startup to everyone, you waste both time and money. The key is to identify a niche target market and go after market share aggressively.

How do you choose a market? There are four main factors to consider:

1. Market Size – Are you targeting a regional demographic? Male? Children? Know exactly how many potential customers are in your target market.
2. Market Wealth – Does this market have the money to spend on your product?
3. Market Competition – Is the market saturated? As in, are there many competitors?
4. Value Proposition – Is your value proposition unique enough to cut through the noise?

Times have certainly changed ! Today’s news that Apple will not include a native YouTube app in iOS 6 in favour of a forthcoming standalone app to be built by Google marks another breaking point for that partnership, a split that began when Apple abandoned Google Maps in iOS 6 — the very reason Eric Schmidt was on stage  in 2007.

But while Google and Apple continue to draw lines in the sand of the mobile OS landscape , each new split has different motivations, and they both  stand to win and lose in different ways. The specific repercussions of YouTube no longer being bundled in iOS are no different.

So what are the reasons ? Mobile advertising is the key to the Google’s future , and by regaining control of how it displays lucrative pre-roll advertising in the app , and being able to roll out more frequent updates , they will take a giant leap to monetizing the millions of daily views that the mobile app has.

Apple, on the other hand, no longer has to pay whatever license fee may have existed for including YouTube in iOS. (YouTube has public APIs, but they don’t seem to be a good option — Microsoft has formally complained about Google interfering with its Windows YouTube Phone app.) What’s more, Apple doesn’t have to pay its own developers to build an app for a service operated by a direct competitor. Instead, it can assume Google will want to keep YouTube in front of the huge numbers of iOS 6 users and build its own app. Which is exactly what’s happening.

At the end of the day, both Apple and Google had something to gain from this split — a markedly different situation than the removal of Google Maps from iOS earlier this year, where Apple had to acquire a mapping company and spend years building a directly competitive product before announcing the change. YouTube is peerless — the very definition of web video for most people. Apple’s simply passing the cost of developing the iOS app back to Google, and Google is gaining the ability to monetize that experience much more directly. (It’s notable that YouTube remains on the Apple TV, where only Apple can develop applications. YouTube is basic functionality for a connected TV device, so Apple has to keep development going.)

In fact, it seem like the only losers here are consumers — we’ll get a less integrated YouTube experience in iOS 6, and probably end up watching more ads. Business as usual in the land of the free (web service).