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State of (online) play

Al Gibes
August 2, 2010 - 3:10 pm
 

Are you kidding me? FarmVille? I can understand the part about Facebook and other social network sites consuming most of the time Americans spend online, but not the games part.
 
Results of the latest "What Americans do online" report by Nielsen came out today, and online games pulled ahead of e-mail as the second most popular activity. What am I missing? Where do people make time for playing online games?
 
I went so far as to "hide" all the games my Facebook friends play. Sorry folks, I don't care how much virtual weeding needs doing or who hit whom in Mafia Wars. (For those looking to throw up their own block of all the games, simply hover your cursor over the right side of the offending post on Facebook and the "hide" button will pop up, along with a "hide _____ (fill in the blank) game." It's that simple.
 
I guess I'm not your typical American Internet user; I spend zero minutes per day/week/month/year playing online games. Zip. Zilch. Nada.
 
The report says social networks swallow up 22.7 percent of all U.S. Internet users' online time. Online games account for 10 percent and e-mail consumes just 8.3 percent, falling from its previous perch at 11.5 percent.
 
The report is based on a measurement of Internet activity in June compared with June 2009. You can see the whole report here:
http://bit.ly/bNx6S7
 
Pass this along to your game-playing friends — on Facebook.

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