Fresh social-Web & Net numbers

If Facebook were a country, it would be the world's third most populous one, after China and India. As for the world's most avid social networkers, Americans are 4th, behind Australians, Britons, and Italians, respectively – The Economist reports in a special report on social networking – followed by users in South Korea, Spain, Brazil, Germany, France, and Japan. The world's most popular social sites are Facebook, Windows Live, MySpace, Chinese portal Baidu, Twitter, Google's social site Orkut (popular in Brazil and India), Hi5, Chinese social site QQ, LinkedIn, and art community site DeviantArt – in that order, based on 10/09 comScore figures and all based in the US unless otherwise indicated. Other big indigenous communities include "Skyrock in France, VKontakte in Russia, and Cyworld in South Korea, as well as numerous smaller social networks that appeal to specific interests such as Muxlim, aimed at the world's Muslims, and ResearchGATE, which connects scientists and researchers." Meanwhile, Nielsen reports that social network sites are the most popular Web destination worldwide, with FB representing 67% of all social site traffic, Mashable.com reports. As for general Internet numbers for 2009, Pingdom.com has some: e.g., 90 trillion emails went out last year (247 billion a day, on average); there were 234 million Web sites as of this past December; and 1.73 Net users as of last September (see that page for more).

2010 social Web snapshot: Nielsen & Pew

Last year, the time Americans spent social networking grew 277%, Twitter grew 500%, and the average US worker spends five hours a moth visiting social network sites at the office. Oh yeah, and Facebook is the No. 3 site for Americans 65 and older (smart grandparents). All this is according to Nielsen's Fact Sheet 2010. As for general Internet use (not just the social part), Nielsen says there are about 195 million active users in the US, 160.3 million of them broadband users. It says broadband penetration was 93.3% at the end of last year, up 16% from 2008. Pew/Internet, however, just released some more conservative numbers showing that "74% of American adults (ages 18 and older) use the Internet – a slight drop from our survey in April 2009, which did not include Spanish interviews. The breakdowns for Net use by age and ethnicity, respectively, are: 18-29 (93%); 30-49 (81%); 50-64 (70%); and 65+ (38%); and white, non-Hispanic (76%); black, non-Hispanic (59%); and Hispanic, English- and Spanish-speaking (55%). Pew also found that household broadband penetration is at 60%, "a drop that is within the margin of error from 63% in April 2009," and that "55% of American adults connect to the internet wirelessly, either through a WiFi or WiMax connection via their laptops or through their handheld device like a smart phone."

US's mobile Web: Data snapshot

Here's the picture, courtesy of Nielsen: The number of US mobile phone users aged 13+ right now is 223 million. The number of mobile Web users is 60.7m (up 33% from 2008 and expected to double by the middle of next year). Compare the 60.7 million to the number of active Internet users – some 195 million – and it looks like the number of mobile Web users is about a third of fixed Web users right now. Within 18 months, Nielsen figures there will be three times as many mobile Web users, or about 120 million. An example of mobile Web use is video-viewing on phones. That growth is pretty exponential too: About 7% of cellphone users view video on their phones now (about 15.6 million), growing to a project 90 million by mid-2011. [One more interesting factoid: 21% of US households are cellphone-only now, Nielsen says, meaning no landlines.]