Online Conversations Incredibly Widespread
"I find it’s always interesting to go back and review the old against the new. So, I’ve collected as much as I can from my previous insane snippets of data and benchmarked it against the here and now, alongside rooting out some new stuff for you to mull over," said 
Jake Hird, a Senior Research Analyst for Econsultancy, which recently published following mind-boggling statistics on their blog.
- Facebook claims that 50% of active users log into the site each day. This would mean at least 175m users every 24 hours.
- Twitter now has 75m user accounts, but only around 15m are active users on a regular basis.
- LinkedIn has over 50m members worldwide..
- Facebook currently has in excess of 350 million active users on global basis. Six months ago, this was 250m…This means over 40% growth in less than 6 months.
- Flickr now hosts more than 4 billion images.
- More than 35m Facebook users update their status each day.
- Wikipedia currently has in excess of 14m articles, meaning that its 85,000 contributors have written nearly a million new posts in six months.
- Photo uploads to Facebook have increased by more than 100%. Currently, there are around 2.5bn uploads to the site each month.
- Back in 2009, the average user had 120 friends within Facebook. This is now around 130.
- Mobile is even bigger than before for Facebook, with more than 65m users accessing the site through mobile-based devices. In six months, this is over 100% increase.
- There are more than 3.5bn pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, etc.) shared each week on Facebook.
- There are now 11m LinkedIn users across Europe.
- Towards the end of last year, the average number of tweets per day was over 27.3 million.
- The average number of tweets per hour was around 1.3m.
- 15% of bloggers spend 10 or more hours each week blogging, according to Technorati’s new State of the Blogosphere.
- At the current rate, Twitter will process almost 10 billion tweets in a single year.
- About 70% of Facebook users are outside the USA.
- India is currently the fastest-growing country to use LinkedIn, with around 3m total users.
- More than 250 Facebook applications have over a million combined users each month.
- 70% of bloggers are organically talking about brands on their blog.
- 38% of bloggers post brand or product reviews.
- More than 80,000 websites have implemented Facebook Connect since December 2008 and more than 60m Facebook users engage with it across these external sites each month.
Think how the statistics will change in next 2-3 years! We will literally be living our lives online rather than offline (just as teenagers do today).
"Impressive stuff, but as always, take these stats with a pinch of salt. As before, no single piece of information can be used to base an online strategy upon, or be used as a forecast as to the direction a specific social media channel may take in the future - you need to fully understand your marketing and business objectives before launching off into this apparently vast space," Hird wrote.
I'm always more interested in the action statistics than the static statistics. For example, there are more than 4 billion images are hosted of Flickr, but how many views are there of these images? How many images have been looked at five times or less (I'm willing to bet the majority of them). The same is true with the 3.5 billion pieces of content shared on Facebook each day. How much content is being released into the internet, but isn't being looked at. If I were to create a new Twitter account right now and send a thousand tweets, would that number mean anything when considering that no one will be reading them?
I think Hird is right that we are beginning to live our lives online, but I'm more interested in knowing how much communication is happening, and how much we're just talking to ourselves.