Compared to user activity on social networking sites last year, Facebook and Twitter posted gains of 69% and 45% respectively in the U.S. Globally, the total minutes spend on social networks monthly saw a more than 100% gain over the same time last year.

On average, global web users across 10 countries spent roughly five and a half hours on social networks in February 2010, up more than two hours from the same time last year.

In a demographic view of social networking activity on mobile devices, women were found do use their phones to “tweet” and “friend” 10% more than men.

In the U.K., almost 80 percent of the time spent on Twitter is accounted for by 7 percent of its most active users. Other social networks show similar patterns.

Social media has not only changed the way consumers communicate and gather on the Web, but also impacted content discovery and navigation.

If social media and social networks are these all-powerful game changers, shouldn’t they eventually make a newsworthy impact on email, the internet’s original “killer app?”

If you’re in the U.S. and are using a social network like Facebook, Myspace or LinkedIn, chances are you’re more affluent and more urban than the average American.

Americans have nearly tripled the amount of time they spend at social networking and blog sites such as Facebook and MySpace from a year ago.

As Myspace.com continues its strategic move toward becoming an “entertainment portal,” the growth to Myspace Music should help cement their presence in this space. Since the site’s launch in September 2008, unique visitors to the music.myspace.com subdomain have increased 190 percent — growing from 4.2 million unique visitors to 12.1 million in June 2009. Year-over-year traffic to the URL has increased 1,017 percent.
When comparing unique visitors of the music.myspace.com subdomain to other sites within the music category in June, it ranked third behind AOL Music and Yahoo! Music and …

Charles Buchwalter, Senior Vice President, Research & Analytics
There has been much talk in the Internet industry around the importance of the “long tail” (niche content and service-oriented sites) and how consumers gravitate to it. The central concept is that people tend to be most engaged in content that is core to their specific interests, rather than more generalized content.
Looking at our newly expanded panel that includes more than 30,000 sites, we have found that short tail sites (those with a greater than 1 percent reach) remain the most engaging …