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Social Networking Most Popular Activity Online, E-Mail Going Mobile

by Terrence O'Brien on August 2, 2010 at 04:30 PM

Nielsen Web Ratings

Ever wonder what Americans are doing during those countless hours that they sit in front of a computer screen? Turns out that, more than anything else, they're getting their Facebook and Twitter on. According to Nielsen, a good 22.7-percent of time online is spent on social networking sites. That's a drastic increase from June of last year, when a reported 15.8-percent of time online was spent social networking. Surprisingly, Americans spend more than twice as much online time being "social" as they do playing games, which is the second most popular activity and takes up 10.2-percent of our time online.

Since last year, the big losers are e-mail (which now accounts for only 8.3-percent of online activities), portals and instant messaging, all of which have seen significant decreases in usage, as evident from the chart above. Time spent e-mailing has decreased by 28-percent, indicating that perhaps Facebook and Twitter may be replacing AIM and Gmail as the communication method of choice on the Web. However, since Facebook and MySpace essentially have built in e-mail and IM clients, it is becoming increasingly difficult to separate "social networking" from other online activities. But e-mail still reigns king when it comes to the mobile Web; when people are out and about, social networking plays a distant third fiddle. [From: Nielsen]

Tags: e-mail, facebook, MobileWeb, nielsen, SocialNetworking, study, top, twitter, web

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