How much time do you spend online in a given day? You might be checking emails or reading the news, but a new study shows that you are more likely to be spending more of your time on social networking sites like Facebook or Twitter. Nielson Internet Research says that users spend about 23% of the time online with social networks and less time doing more traditional tasks like checking email.
In the study, categories included things like checking email, going to web portals and playing games. Playing games has seen a very large increase thanks to games like Farmville on social networking site Facebook.com. Now online gaming has jumped up 10% into the second spot, which was previously held by checking your emails.
Checking your email has dropped to only 8%, but that could be that it just takes less time to do, so users are moving along to other “tasks” faster than before. Because you can get text messages and chat on Facebook, there is less of a reason to send an email to someone.
Visiting web portals, like Yahoo and MSN, for news and weather, has dropped to about 4% of your time this year. Again, social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook can be a good source of the news when others are posting, meaning you don’t have to make that one stop at Yahoo or MSN.
More of less, the study indicates that users are browsing social network sites more than they use Google. Even though more people use Google throughout the day, more time is still spent updating status and tweeting about breaking news or sports from the night before.
