Global web users spent on average five and a half hours on social network sites in December. That is an increase in time spent of 82 per cent in one year, according to the latest number from Nielsen.

• Subscribe to BetaTales by RSS
• Receive our posts by mail
  
• Follow me on Twitter

It is an amazing growth, as is illustrated by the graphs from Nielsen below.  According to the analysis company social networks is now the most popular online category, followed by gaming and instant messaging.  And most popular is Facebook, with an average time spent of about six hours per month. Two thirds of global social media users visited the site during a month.

This remarkable fast development proves indeed how social networks are becoming platforms for all other kinds of services and content on the web. No company wanting to communicate with people can anymore ignore the power of social media.

User terms at major social network sites like Facebook and Twitter are highly questionable, according to a survey by the Norwegian Consumer Council.

• Subscribe to BetaTales by RSS
• Follow me on Twitter

Please raise your hand if you took the time to read all 11 pages of Facebook’s user terms!

No? You didn’t read them? How irresponsible of you!

What about the 14 pages from LinkedIn? You didn’t read those either?

Shame on you!

Norway’s Consumer Council did read them, though.

They actually did it together with researchers from Sintef as part of a study on social media. After having done so, they were very worried about violations of basic consumer rights.

Read more about the study here.

After having studied the user terms the researches made this summary:

A lot of red crosses, as you can see.
A short explanation for non-Norwegian readers: Nettby is a local social network site which is particularly popular among Norwegian teenagers. It is run by the newspaper VG, which is one of the most visited news sites in the world. Origo is a social network run by A-pressen, a chain of local newspapers.

A couple of conclusions from the Norwegian Consumer Council:

• Users typically give up their rights to personal information.
• User terms are normally designed in a way to make it impossible for users to understand the scope of what they accept.
• It is complicated to change the privacy settings
• User terms can be changed unilaterally by the site without your prior consent

The Consumer Council argues that interest groups need to work to protect the consumers’ privacy online.

I blog about this survey as I think it might be of interest for social network users outside Norway as well. The Norwegian Consumer Council has been very active in defending consumer rights on the web. A few years back it gained international attention when it launche a fight against how Apple failed to make its iTunes store compatible with other music players than iPod. A couple of weeks ago the council launched a similar attack on Amazon’s user terms for Kindle, claiming they violated basic consumer rights.

More than one in five web users worldwide visited the social network Facebook in December.

• Subscribe to our RSS feed

Facebook has experience a phenomenal growth during the last year and recent numbers from Comscore shows that it now has nearly twice as many users as MySpace.com.

In December 222 million people visited Facebook compared to 125 million for MySpace, according to the figures as reported by Techcrunch.

In the same month the number of worldwide web users for the first time passed 1 billion.

You may also be interested in reading:

• 5 social media trends in 2009
  
• The latest numbers on social networks usage
• Weekly Digest of social networking space

Finding updated numbers of social networks users can be hard.  Here are some of the sources which might help you.

The list is inspired by the blog of web strategist Jeremiah Owyang, who has collected some of the useful reports in this regard.

For an overall view, try the Nielsen Wire. Its latest report was published in October and shows that Myspace is still in the lead, but with Facebook demostrating the strongest growth in number of users  (116 %) over the last years.

Rubicon Consulting gives more insight into who the users are in a major survey. Unfortunately the survey only includes US users.

Some more links from Owyang’s blog: