Online, All the Time
According to the online tracking service www.comScore, Americans spent 302 billion minutes online in July—or the equivalent of 6,760 lifetimes, give or take. Americans’ favorite place to hang out on the World Wide Web was—no surprise here—Google.
The omnipresent search engine snagged 123 million visitors in July, seven million more than second-place Yahoo! Americans seem to love lots of search engines, with four of the five most popular sites being virtual portals to somewhere else.
YouTube was sixth on the list, while Wikipedia clocked in at No. 9. Facebook, which in July 2005 was the 236th most popular Web gathering point, is now No. 16. (Forbes)
Let Your Fingers Do the Talking
According to data from U.S. Nielsen, cell phone users do more texting than talking on their mobile devices. Nielsen says the average mobile user sends about 357 texts a month these days, compared to making 204 calls. Youth boost these stats dramatically, with teens between ages 13 and 17 sending a whopping 1,742 texts a month. That’s 1,728 texts more than the average cell-using senior citizen sends. (MediaPost Publications)
Plug and Play
In an effort to combat sliding CD sales, several music companies are participating in a new musical format—thumbnail memory cards. The format’s called “slotMusic” and is intended to mesh the attractions of CDs and computer downloads. The cards can be inserted into lots of current cell phones and multimedia players; they also come with a USB connection so users can plug them into their computers. The format has buy-in from Universal, Sony, Warner and EMI—four of the biggest music companies—and retailers, such as Best Buy and Wal-Mart, likely will stock the format. (Associated Press)
Twitterpated
If The New York Times publishes “all the news that’s fit to print,” microbloggers post … well, that and everything else: what they eat for breakfast, when they wake up from their naps, what they think of the latest Subway commercial … everything. Twitter is the kingpin site for microbloggers, and it caters to folks who like a kind of stream-of-consciousness connection with their friends.
Twitter has some legitimate, even important uses, of course. Major news outlets have used Twitterers to keep tabs on what’s going on in hot spots where journalists can’t get the full story (or get in at all). However, so much contact can be fatiguing. “A lot of us hate the people who just Twitter what the traffic’s like every day and that their flight is delayed again,” said Twitter user Dan Buczaczer. (Chicago Tribune)
