Facebook Popularity Increases Dramatically

Facebook has seen a 105% increase in popularity over the past year

The number of unique visitors logging on to Facebook increased by more than 105 percent over the course of the past year, according to research published in PC World and compiled by comScore. Approximately 112 million unique visitors logged on to Facebook in December 2009 alone, thus turning the social networking portal into one of the top five most popular websites in the United States. The site now attracts nearly 38 million individual users on an average day who together click on approximately 45 billion pages each month.

Not only are more people logging on to the world’s most popular social networking site, but they are also spending more time than ever before posting photos, adding status updates or commenting on their friends’ walls. Facebook users collectively ended up spending some 28 billion minutes networking last December. In fact, Americans now spend around 7 percent of their online time using Facebook. Registered users are also relying more on Facebook when it comes to communicating with friends, staying posted on community events and browsing the photos of long lost peers. While most users logged on to Facebook less than 8 days out of a month in December 2008, this figure rose to 10.4 days at the end of 2009. The average Facebook user also spends approximately 247 minutes browsing the site and commenting on profiles each month, which represents a 45 percent increase from 2008.

But Facebook’s  rapidly growing appeal also raises more concerns about the amount of personal information now available publicly. While Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, argued that worries about less privacy on Facebook are pure speculation, the recent changes to privacy settings have in fact made more information on individual users available to the general public by default.