Report suggests Facebook frenz

SAN JOSE, Calif. - "Time suck" is a phrase often used to describe online social networks like Facebook and online games like FarmVille. Now new research quantifies the phenomenon, showing that nearly one-third of the time Americans spend online is devoted to such activities, while time spent on conventional e-mail and portals such as Yahoo has declined.

The report by Nielsen Online, entitled "What Americans Do Online" and released recently, describes changing Internet use during a period of intensifying competition in an industry centered in Silicon Valley.

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While Google's leading search technology has proved a powerful advertising vehicle and Yahoo leads in banner ads, Facebook's dominance in the growing social networking sector is recognized as a major competitive threat to both of those companies.

Strikingly, Nielsen's research also showed that Americans now spend more time playing games than handling e-mail - in part because tens of millions are staying in touch on Facebook rather than communicating on services such as Yahoo Mail or Google's Gmail.

"That's the logical conclusion," said David Martin, a Nielsen analyst. "A platform like Facebook incorporates e-mail and instant messaging. Social networks have incorporated those basic functions in a much larger system of communication, content management and even gaming. The growth has come at the expense of traditional portals, e-mail platforms and IM."

American Internet users on average are spending more than six hours per month on social networking sites and more than four hours per month playing online games, the research found. In addition to those activities, users on average spent another 14 hours per month online at news, entertainment and other sites.

Silicon Valley companies topped every sector encompassed by Nielsen's research. Yahoo ranked as the No. 1 portal, ahead of MSN and Google, as well as the leading provider of e-mail and instant messaging services. Google led the search category by a wide margin, and its YouTube division led the video/movie sector. Electronic Arts topped a highly competitive game sector, Apple's iTunes dominated the "multi-category entertainment" area, and eBay edged out Craigslist in the "auctions-classifieds" category.

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Nielsen's time research, which tracked 200,000 Internet users and compared June 2009 to June 2010, roughly coincides with a 12-month period in which Facebook doubled its global reach to 500 million users. It has been especially popular among younger Internet users. A recent study of Sexy Costumes U.S. Internet users by the Pew Research Center found that more than half of those between age 18 and 45 had a profile on a social networking site, compared to 30 percent of the "baby boomers" under 65 and 6 percent of the population older than 65.

Facebook's dominance in social networking is such that Nielsen found it accounts for nearly 85 percent of time spent in the sector, compared to 5.6 percent for runner-up Myspace, 1.1 percent for Twitter and 1.1 percent for Blogger.

Overall, the combination of social networks and online games are consuming 32.9 percent of Internet time, up from a combined 25.1 percent, Nielsen found.

The growth was driven by a 43 percent increase in time spent on social networking and 10 percent increase on games. Meanwhile, time spent on e-mail, portals and instant messaging showed marked declines.

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