"The Internet" versus "the real world" has become a hot topic in the news these days. But are they really as separate as we might think?
Internet privacy has been all over the media lately, even involving giants like Google and Facebook. People are growing more interested in the availability and control of their information online.
As more and more people "go online," our digital identities are slowly blending with real world identities. The focus is more on showcasing and controlling these digital identities, whether through what music playlists we choose to share or how we summarize our interests on our social networking sites, to how clever we can make our 140-character tweets. Instead of looking for anonymity, we seek ways to present ourselves in the best light possible.
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So just how widespread is social media in the Internet age? Check out some of these statistics:
• On average 175 million users log in to Facebook every 24 hours.
• There are 11 million LinkedIn users across Europe.
• Towards the end of 2009, the average number of tweets per day was over 27.3 million.
• The average number of tweets per hour was around 1.3 million.
• More than 700,000 local business have active Pages on Facebook.
• 15% of bloggers spend 10 or more hours each week blogging.
• There are 126 million of these blogs on the Internet.
• Flickr hosts 4 billion photos as of October 2009.
• Wikipedia currently has in excess of 14 million articles, meaning that its 85,000 contributors have written nearly a million new posts in six months.
• YouTube serves 1 billion videos a day, with 12.2 billion videos viewed per month in the United States.
• 82 percent of Internet users watch videos online with the average user viewing 182 videos per month.
• 90 trillion emails were sent on the Internet in 2009 with an average of 247 billion emails a day.
• 81 percent of these emails were spam.
• There are 1.4 billion email users worldwide.
* Thanks to Jake Hird at E-Consultancy and Amit Desai at Giga Thoughts.
Social media will be around as long as people are curious about others and interested in presenting themselves in a controlled way to their friends, family, and business contacts. The emphasis is not on reducing our Internet availability but understanding how the focus has changed to a more open Web experience.
How do you use social media?
A connected world: Internet usage by population percentage
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