Japanese Tsunami Damage - Â Photo by Keichi Nakane via Jezebel

Japan is used to earthquakes, but one this big was unsettling even for one of the most earthquake prepared countries in the world. Though Japan has very strict building codes that help minimize the damage caused from falling buildings, the tsunami is a different story. The speed of the water can often outpace any warnings, leaving people in low lying areas minutes to escape fast moving waves – nevermind cars or houses in the path of those waves.

So far the death toll in Japan is in the hundreds, but expected to rise. While it may seem minimal, social media and the internet are playing a role in helping people communicate, and tech companies have stepped up to do what they can. With voice phone lines overwhelmed, and transportation severely hobbled, tweets and data posts on social media sites may actually be one of the few ways people are able to get information to or from loved ones when voice lines are down.

• Yahoo! Japan has a list of earthquake resources
• Google’s People Finder, originally created following the earthquake in Haiti, has been revived for Chile, New Zealand, and now Japan (embedded below)

The story is unfolding over Twitter and YouTube as well, and a second 6.6 magnitude earthquake (not aftershock) is being reported near Nagano, Japan.

Let’s hope that somewhere a tweet or text resource is helping to make a difference.

A social network, pop star and socialite top popularity lists. Stop us if you've heard this before.

YouTube, which rose from 7th most visited site in 2009 the 5th most visited in 2010, helps make up the 9.85% of all US internet visits that Google properties claim. While Facebook hasn’t surpassed total Google owned/controlled traffic yet, they aren’t too far off at 8.93%. Yahoo!, often seen as the big engine that couldn’t, still represents 8.12% of all US visits with their various properties including email, which is actually a more popular destination than the Yahoo! homepage.

What surprised us though, is actually the site that traded places with YouTube: MySpace. The site is down off of last year’s 5th place to number 7, but still ranking. Yes, we thought that everyone had abandoned the site with the strange new logo. Frankly, we were pretty sure the people running MySpace were abandoning ship when they seemingly threw in the towel and partnered with Facebook, but it looks like some of you just can’t say goodbye to sparkly glitter gifs and 2001-style clip art.

Speaking of sparkly, glittering things, silver covered magazine mover Kim Kardashian edged out Oprah (who does a pretty good job of moving magazines also) for the title of top searched personality. Rush Limbaugh, Miley Cyrus and Glenn Beck are numbers 3, 4, and 5 respectively. That sounds like the start of a party game where you have to put random words into a sentence that makes sense. We’ll let you know when we come up with one.

Moving on to musicians, butcher calendar girl Lady Gaga dominated searches and beat out the teenage endorsement dream that is Justin Bieber for number one music personality search. Eminem, Taylor Swift and late King of Pop Michael Jackson were 3, 4, and 5 respectively.

On the chopping block: shared bookmarking service Delicious, which in spite of Yahoo’s handling has a loyal userbase; MyBlogLog, a community based around the blogs people read; Yahoo! Buzz, a Digg competitor that encouraged voting on stories; numerous other Yahoo! products that have passed their sell-by dates including Bookmarks and Picks; and search engines you probably forgot existed like All the Web and AltaVista. {TechCrunch}

While there probably aren’t many people who will miss the last batch, lots of people are voicing their sadness over the decision to see Delicious go, and to a lesser extent MyBlogLog.

Yahoo’s official word on the matter confirmed that product reductions are on the horizon.

“Part of our organizational streamlining involves cutting our investment in underperforming or off-strategy products to put better focus on our core strengths and fund new innovation in the next year and beyond.

We continuously evaluate and prioritize our portfolio of products and services, and do plan to shut down some products in the coming months such as Yahoo! Buzz, our Traffic APIs, and others. We will communicate specific plans when appropriate.”

At this rate, Yahoo’s going to be firing the yellow smiley face and cutting one of the Os to streamline.

Which is really a bit sad considering that people do still use Delicious, and those who like digging into web data have relied on Yahoo’s more open (than Google) information for years. Especially considering the years of curated data for website preferences that Delicious offers, we really hope that at least one of the services on that list is able to find a new home somewhere else.