There’s been so much hype about social media in the last 12 months but beyond the hype lies some fascinating data. Twitter has been grabbing a lot of the media headlines, but it is important to keep some perspective around the relative scales of the social sites and in particular the continued growth of Facebook.
Above: Facebook dominates search trends. Whilst most rank sites by UBs and UVs, Facebook is the #1 site in the world in terms of time spent and search volume.
In 2008, Facebook did the unthinkable and overtook Google and YouTube for trending search volume. Since then it has continued its climb relentlessly. To put a relative scale on the graph above it is interesting to compare it with the spikes caused by Obama during election and inauguration. You quickly get the idea. Facebook has become a giant and shows no sign of slowing at present. In Australia over 5 million users spend an average of over 4 hours on the site each month, (compare that with less than an hour with Google).
Facebook Stats July 2009 (via Facebook):
International Usage
About 70% of Facebook users are outside the United States
General Growth
More than 250 million active users
More than 120 million users log on to Facebook at least once each day
More than two-thirds of Facebook users are outside of college
The fastest growing demographic is those 35 years old and older
User Engagement
Average user has 120 friends on the site
More than 5 billion minutes are spent on Facebook each day (worldwide)
More than 30 million users update their statuses at least once each day
More than 8 million users become fans of Pages each day
Applications
More than 1 billion photos uploaded to the site each month
More than 10 million videos uploaded each month
More than 1 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) shared each week
More than 2.5 million events created each month
More than 45 million active user groups exist on the site
Mobile
There are more than 30 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices.
Posted by @eunmac
Amnesia Blog 
Very interesting. Others seem to be asking if Facebook is past its prime? http://tech.msn.com/products/articlepcw.aspx?cp-documentid=20704423>1=40000
Not sure if a time on site is a valid measure with FB as many people keep it open in the background. I spend “all day” on Gmail but you couldn’t say I actually use it all day. Are they measuring concurrent, sequential actions and are they aware of pauses in activity?