statistics

Nielsen: Twitter's growing really, really, really, really fast

A small new survey from Nielsen about the five fastest growing "member community destinations" in the U.S. reveals what we all kind of knew already: Twitter is at the top. From February 2008 to February 2009, it clocked in at a whopping 1,382 percent growth rate. That's to be expected, considering the amount of press the still-without-a-business-model microblogging service has gotten in recent months.

In third place is Facebook, with 228 percent growth year-over-year according to Nielsen. That's not terribly surprising, as Facebook is still growing in the U.S. but not quite as … Read more

Three-in-one Web browsing with Lunascape

If there is one battle that continues to rage, it's the war for browser supremacy.

While exact market share figures change on a daily basis (and vary widely from site to site), Microsoft's Internet Explorer commands about 65 percent of the market, Mozilla's Firefox about 20 percent, Apple's Safari about 8 percent, and Google's Chrome about 2 percent.

There are three main rendering engines:

Trident, from Internet Explorer, is used by many applications on the Microsoft Windows platform to render HTML, including the minibrowsers in Winamp and RealPlayer. Gecko, Mozilla's open-source rendering engine, is used by a variety of products derived from the Mozilla code base, including the Firefox Web browser. WebKit, originally from Konquerer, and currently best-known as powering Apple's Safari and Google's Chrome Web browsers.

Different engines mean that developers (and users) are still forced to contend with Web sites that are designed with one specific browser in mind. This often means a lack of functionality or a flat-out inability to use a site with the wrong browser.

Lunascape, (currently Windows-only) is a triple-engine browser that has a new take on the "browser wars." Launched in November 2008, Lunascape continues to push the envelope with its latest beta. In addition to improving the core triple-engine technology, new features include toolbar shrinking, appropriate for Netbook users who require low CPU usage. With this update, Lunascape claims to have the fastest JavaScript execution, according to the SunSpider JavaScript test. … Read more

Facebook hits 175 million user mark

A little more than a month after announcing it had 150 million active users, Facebook has reached 175 million active users--the statistic the social-networking site prefers to use, rather than registered accounts overall.

Dave Morin, who runs Facebook's application platform team, announced the milestone Friday evening on his Twitter/FriendFeed. Facebook reached 150 million just more than two months after reaching 120 million and about four months after reaching 100 million.

While Facebook got its start at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., in 2004, most of this recent growth is coming from outside the U.S.

"This includes … Read more

Pew analyzes the Twitterati, or not

When is a Twitter user not a Twitter user? Well, according to a new study from Pew Internet, "Twitter user" is a broad definition.

The research firm released a study this week in which the results indicated that in December, "11% of online American adults said they used a service like Twitter or another service that allowed them to share updates about themselves or to see the updates of others." Wow! Twitter sure is catching on!

But then you read the fine print: The catch here is that "update your status" is also a … Read more

Whee! New numbers on social network usage

The blogosphere simply loves to slurp up social-networking traffic stats, and on Monday we got a nice tasty serving of them with some new numbers from Compete.com for the month of January. The results? Facebook is in the lead, with about 68 million unique visitors, well ahead of MySpace's 58 million. (The two are pegged at 1.1 billion and 810 million page views, respectively.)

This may be the first survey we've seen that puts Facebook ahead of the News Corp.-owned MySpace in U.S. traffic. It also puts Twitter as the third-biggest social-media site in … Read more

Facebook now twice as big as MySpace? Oh boy

The blogosphere's love affair with Facebook-MySpace traffic wars just won't stop.

On Thursday, TechCrunch posted new statistics from ComScore that show Facebook now pulling in nearly twice as many unique visitors worldwide as its News Corp.-owned competitor.

About 222 million people visited Facebook worldwide in December (keep in mind that the social network pegs its active user count somewhere just north of 150 million these days) versus 125 million people for MySpace.

This comes less than two weeks after other ComScore statistics indicated that not only was MySpace still bigger in the U.S., it was way … Read more

ComScore: In U.S., MySpace-Facebook race goes on

It's that time again: Measuring the traffic of the two biggest social-networking sites, Facebook and MySpace. Traffic firm ComScore has released year-end numbers that show the News Corp.-owned MySpace is still noticeably ahead in the U.S., but that Facebook's traffic is getting up there--however slowly.

Michael Arrington at TechCrunch has done some, uh, crunching: he estimates that at current growth rates, Facebook's U.S. audience will overtake MySpace's early in 2010.

The key point here is that the U.S. growth for both social networks has cooled down. Facebook's average monthly growth rate … Read more

Facebook's growth goes faster and faster and faster

Facebook is still growing like wildfire: earlier this week, the social network put out stats that peg its active-user count at 140 million.

Inside Facebook blogger Justin Smith compared this to the date that Facebook said it hit 130 million members, and estimated that Facebook must be growing by a whopping 600,000 or 700,000 users per day.

We've checked in with Facebook to see if it has an official comment on that estimation; earlier this year, the company's network was growing by 250,000 users per day.

Statistics firms like Nielsen, ComScore, and Compete.com all … Read more

ComScore: 100 million YouTube viewers in October

Online video is really taking off, according to stats firm ComScore. Not that we should be particularly surprised by that assertion. But the leader in the space, Google's YouTube, during October pulled in 100 million viewers in the U.S. for a market share of almost 40 percent.

That market share is about the same as it was this spring. But lower in the ranks, there's some change afoot. Video content hub Hulu, a joint venture between NBC Universal and News Corp., has edged its way into sixth place behind YouTube, Fox Interactive Media (which owns MySpace and … Read more

Get your sports fix here

If it's a crisp-looking score-tracking app you're looking for that follows major U.S. sports associations and leagues, you've come to the right place. The free Sportacular is abound with week-by-week standings and scores that auto-update every 30 seconds when there's a game on. The flood of stats is easily navigated and read thanks to well-placed tabs and menus. You can view updated stats by player and by team, and can even create and track your own fantasy team. Sportacular also keeps fans up-to-date on their sport with RSS feeds from ESPN, Yahoo, and FOX. In … Read more