Australians the most sociable online

Jan 31, 2010 by Dirk Singer

Two charts from the current Economist special report on social networking. First of all, according to Nielsen, “measured by hours spent on them per social-network user, the most avid online networkers are in Australia, followed by those in Britain and Italy.”

By comparison, Americans spent on average six hours a month on social networks in October, almost 3x as much as in October 2007.

Secondly, a chart that again confirms the dominance of Facebook as being for social media what Google is for search. The other day I mentioned a Reuters article questioning whether Facebook was achieving technological ‘lock-in’, becoming a default that’s difficult to shift.

As well as Google, Reuters actually compared Facebook with the introduction of the QWERTY keyboard – introduced in the 1870s as the default for keyboards, and not the best or most logical solution out there but simply the one that stuck.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Australians world’s biggest users of social media (mumbrella.com.au)
• Blame Canada: Facebook Being Probed Over Privacy – Again (gigaom.com)
• Gangster Prisoner ‘Issued Facebook Threats’ (news.sky.com)
• Time Spent on Social Networks Increases by 82% in 2009 (rotorblog.com)
• The social network juggernaut rolls on (theequitykicker.com)