Online activities such as social networking and blogging are now more attractive and time-consuming than e-mailing according to the latest findings from market research company Nielsen Online. Although it’s not surprising, this is a major change in the habits and directions of user of the Internet and telecommunications. 

 

According to the report released by Nielsen, which specializes in tracking time spent online visiting different websites, about two thirds of the world’s population uses "member communities" such as blogs and social networks. 

 

One in every 11 minutes spend online at a global scale is allocated to social networks and blogs or a total of 45 billion minutes which equals approximately a combined 85,500 years spent on blogs and social networking. The figures are for December 2008. 

 

According to data on the period between December 2007 and December 2008, as much as 66.8 percent of the global online population was accounted by blogs and social networks. The countries where it was recorded the most rapid growth in that segment are Switzerland, German and the United Kingdom.

 

As for the average time spent on social networking sites or blogs, Nielsen said users checked or updated their Facebook pages (the most popular social-networking destination around the world) for three hours and ten minutes per month, on average. The Nielsen Online survey splits the online community into five categories: search, portals, PC software and email and the social networking and blogs category. 

 

As expected, searching is the hottest category. As much as 85.9 percent of the world’s population has used a search engine. The portals category followed with 85.2 percent, Software was third with 73.4 percent, while the communities of blogs and social networks took E-mail’s fourth place with 66.8 percent. Email was fifth with 65.1 percent. 

 

In the social network sites category, Facebook is No.1 with 108.3 million unique users. MySpace was second with 81.0 million, while other sites such as Classmates Online, Orkut, and LinkedIn had significantly less users (19.7 million, 17.5 million, and 15.0 million people, respectively). 

 

Overall, the online population was also on the rise during that period.