Admin July 15th, 2009

A new study from the Nielsen Group makes official what we’ve known all along: we waste more time on Facebook than any other website. In their compilation of U.S. Internet usage data for June, 2009, Nielson ranked by hours the amount of time that the Internet user spends on a website in one month. These are the top ten websites that take our time and consume our workday. At the very top, outstripping the next in-line by nearly an hour and a half was Facebook.com. Next in line was Yahoo, followed by Google, and Microsoft, respectively.

The massive interest in Facebook is due, first of all, to its social appeal. The apparent thrill of in-your-home socializing with as many people as you want, keeps users coming back for more. Millions of users are now accessing the site via mobile device, which adds up to countless hours spent on the network. Job-seekers, too are a growing contingency, as Facebook gives them one more forum on which to market their skills.

The news comes at the same time Facebook’s user population crashes through the quarter-billion barrier. Independent studies confirm that Facebook is more popular than Twitter, MySpace, Digg, and any other social networking site, combined. That’s an impressive feather to have your hat.

While numbers are fun to look at, such statistics may cause employer’s concern. More and more IT managers and bosses are putting the kibosh on Facebook, hoping to keep social-happy employees from squandering away company time by checking their friends’ status updates. To circumvent filters or regulations, many employees simply log on using their phones.

Newly plugged-in retirees and the above-55 crowd may also be thanked for their contribution to the ballooning popularity of Facebook. A recent rise in the baby boomer generation on Facebook has given the social networking site a new more mature cast.

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