More seconds (expressed as minutes) make Facebook first
From the "oh, really" file: Facebook has passed Google to become the No. 1 consumer of Americans’ online time.
ComScore reported last week that Americans in August spent just more than 41 million minutes on Facebook, accounting for nearly 10 percent of their total time online. Google sites, including the namesake search engine, YouTube, Gmail and other Google news and content sites, consumed almost 40 million minutes, about 2.5 percent fewer minutes than Facebook.
Yahoo pulled in a respectable third place with 37.7 million minutes spent on its branded sites.
In August, people spent 41.1 million minutes on Facebook, comScore said Thursday, about 9.9 percent of their Web-surfing minutes for the month. That just barely surpassed the 39.8 million minutes, or 9.6 percent, people spent on all of Google Inc.'s sites combined, including YouTube, Gmail, Google News and other content sites.
In case you missed it, Google also streamlined its search engine last week, introducing Google Instant. With the change, Google users begin to see suggested results as they type their queries, often meaning that they find what they're looking for more quickly. Google estimates every search now takes two-to-five fewer seconds to complete.
Not surprisingly, someone at Google calculated the collective benefit of all those moments of two- to five-second-savings. The amount of newfound time we have on our hands is astounding.
The Google.com/instant page states:
— If everyone uses Google Instant globally, we estimate this will save more than 3.5 billion seconds a day. That’s 11 hours saved every second.
I'm struggling to understand how you could save 11 hours per second, but hey, it's the math.
Now, if only the Google time-savers will confer with the Facebook folks and figure out how to cut 11 hours per week, day, minute, or second from the time spent there. If they did, imagine how much more people could accomplish at work.
Read the story on Facebook overtaking Google:
Las Vegas Review-Journal:
Facebook inches past Google for Web users' minutes
http://bit.ly/apfbgoog
