Numbers can be a little mind-numbing some times, especially when it comes to anything to do with technology and the Internet. Facebook with its 800 million users, or pretty close to it, Twitter with its 225 million active users and that folks, is just scratching the surface.

So, just how many of us are there on the Internet anyway you ask.

Well according web traffic monitoring company Pingdom there were 2.1 billion active Internet users for the year 2011. This is up from the 360 million that were accounted for at the end of 2000 and it also means that 30 percent of the Earth’s population is active on the web.

Even though  social media is a relatively new phenomena it has some pretty impressive numbers to go along with its youth. According to Pingdo:

• 800+ million – Number of users on Facebook by the end of 2011.
• 200 million – Number of users added to Facebook during 2011.
• 350 million – Number of Facebook users that log in to the service using their mobile phone.
• 225 million – Number of Twitter accounts.
• 100 million – Number of active Twitter users in 2011.
• 18.1 million – People following Lady Gaga. Twitter’s most popular user.
• 250 million – Number of tweets per day (October 2011).
• 1 – #egypt was the number one hashtag on Twitter.
• 8,868 – Number of tweets per second in August for the MTV Video Music Awards.
• $50,000 – The amount raised for charity by the most retweeted tweet of 2011.
• 39 million – The number of Tumblr blogs by the end of 2011.
• 70 million – Total number of WordPress blogs by the end of 2011.
• 1 billion – The number of messages sent with WhatsApp during one day (October 2011).
• 2.6 billion – Worldwide IM accounts.
• 2.4 billion – Social networking accounts worldwide.

Of course you can`t compile any web numbers without looking at the impact that video has had on the Web:

• 1 trillion – The number of video playbacks on YouTube.
• 140 – The number of YouTube video playbacks per person on Earth.
• 48 hours – The amount of video uploaded to YouTube every minute.
• 1 – The most viewed video on YouTube during 2011 was Rebecka Black’s “Friday.”
• 82.5% – Percentage of the U.S. Internet audience that viewed video online.
• 76.4% – YouTube’s share of the U.S. video website market (December 2011).
• 4,189,214 –Number of new users on Vimeo.
• 201.4 billion – Number of videos viewed online per month (October 2011).
• 88.3 billion – Videos viewed per month on Google sites, incl. YouTube (October 2011).
  
• 43% – Share of all worldwide video views delivered by Google sites, incl. YouTube.

One has to wonder in light of the incredible growth of mobile what kind of numbers we will see next year.

via Windows Observer

Pingdom reports in to let us know there are 2.1 Billion active Web users worldwide is a post from: The Inquisitr

Bet you think you are pretty smart when it comes to making sure that you don’t leave any trace of your information lying around the web when you are finished surfing. After all the first thing you do is install or update some sort of ad blocking software with any new system. You make sure that you clean out your cookies on a regular bases and some even go to the extent of turning off javascript on a site by site basis.

Yup you’re pretty clever. Those info gobbling sites don’t get anything from you.

Or do they?

Well according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation all those precautions are nice but may actually do little to stop sites from being able to tell who you are. It seems that the overwhelming number of browsers have unique signatures and it is these signatures that become your fingerprints as you wander the web.

EFF found that 84% of the configuration combinations were unique and identifiable, creating unique and identifiable browser “fingerprints.” Browsers with Adobe Flash or Java plug-ins installed were 94% unique and trackable.

“We took measures to keep participants in our experiment anonymous, but most sites don’t do that,” said EFF Senior Staff Technologist Peter Eckersley. “In fact, several companies are already selling products that claim to use browser fingerprinting to help websites identify users and their online activities. This experiment is an important reality check, showing just how powerful these tracking mechanisms are.”

Now isn’t that comforting to know.

Leaving your fingerprints all over the Web is a post from: The Inquisitr

I guess it is to be expected but I for one am getting really sick and tired of all these studies that pop up around Twitter spouting off who it is popular with this group of people, stupid to another group, or dangerous to kiddies of all ages. However far be it from us here at The Inquisitr to prejudge the validity of suck moronic studies much like the newest one from Edison Research titled: Twitter Usage in America.

The big buzz out of this study; that used 1,753 Americans as its baseline, is that African Americans love Twitter or at least 24 percent of them do.

Wow.

Are you impressed?

Well how about a couple of these little tidbits:

• 87 percent of Americans are aware of Twitter (in contrast to Facebook’s 88 percent)
• 7 percent (17 million) actively use Twitter (in contrast to 41 percent who maintain a Facebook profile)
• 47 percent of regular users of Twitter update their status messages
• 51 percent of active Twitter users follow brands, companies or products.

Like I said – pointless but hey at least you are informed, right?

hat tip to The Wrap

Latest pointless Twitter stat: African Americans LOVE Twitter is a post from: The Inquisitr

The exponential growth of the internet never fails to amaze me.

Every year, you think it couldn’t possibly be more influential, or huge, or humanity uniting, and then you see videos like this one. Plus, it’s done in a soothing yet hip color scheme with fun graphics included so you can wrap your head around figures like “billion,” “trillion,” and “Europe.”

If you dig stats, check out the video below on the crazy strides made by the internet in general in even just the last month. (For instance, 247 billion e-mails are sent every day. 200 billion of those are spam. And why is Facebook so slow to load sometimes? Because 6 million other people are all trying to be on it, too, every minute.)

[Via Mashable]

Gorgeous stats video on “the state of the internet” is a post from: The Inquisitr

OKCupid is interesting for a variety of reasons, one being that they don’t bombard us with suicidal thought-inducing commercials that could be mistaken for Cialis ads, featuring depressing people frolicking on a boat.

Another cool thing is the way they analyze and blog about trends present in their massive pool of daters- whether it’s the impact of religion on relationship marketability or the relative success of profile picture poses, OKCupid has a knack for presenting stats in a way that recalls the pop-statistics book Freakonomics. While a lot of the data gathered by the algorithms address things users can control like cleavage exposure, today’s topic is one sadly less adjustable on the user end: aging out of the dating pool.

The lengthy post to which I refer isn’t all bad news though- while it confirms that online matchmaking favors the under-thirty set, an argument is made that there’s an untapped sweet spot of women in their thirties and beyond who are, get this, “in a fellatio-positive time in their lives.” Yes, if you take nothing else from reading this, remember those words: fellatio-positive. There’s even an interactive map showing level of enthusiasm towards oral sex by region and age that you can adjust to show how bj-friendly women in your area happen to be. Isn’t math fun?

It’s not just a propensity for sword swallowing that increases after a woman leaves her twenties- kissing, bondage and threesomes were all looked upon more favorably in OKCupid’s data collection. Still not convinced? The OKCupid data goes on to point out that women over 30 are generally happier (although this inexplicably drops off at 40), more self confident, and shower/brush their teeth at a higher frequency. As for attractiveness, while the writer of the post concedes that youth and beauty are inextricably linked, attractiveness level stays fairly constant throughout one’s twenties and thirties. (Out of your league is out of your league, homes.)

TIME posted an article today with slightly more sobering statistics regarding online dating. While America’s still patting themselves on the collective back for electing a black president, an overwhelming number of us would be far less content with a black date. Studies conducted by other dating sites, including Match, Yahoo and Chemistry, found that 73% of female users indicated a racial preference for potential partners, and of that 73%, 64% of those studied have a “whites only” sign above their dating water fountain. Men aren’t that much more racially enlightened, with nearly 60% of those surveyed expressing a preference, and possibly only branching out from white women because they think Asian women get their freak on more in the boudoir. (The exact word used was “hypersexual.”)

Black women and Asian men seem to have the hardest go of it when looking for a mate online, again partially due to stereotypes. (Black women are mentioned in the study as being stereotyped as “bossy,” and I won’t speculate on what people say about Asian men.) Once again, OKCupid is heading up the data gathering game, from the earlier link about profile pics:

After attempting to control for attractiveness… the study found that black women garnered the fewest responses of any female group. White women responded at much higher rates to white men than to men of color. Asian women’s and Latinas’ response rates showed even stronger preferences for white men. (The site’s latest eye-opening study determined which types of profile pictures elicit the most responses. To all the single ladies: the older you are, the more cleavage you should show.)

So there it is- plenty of fish in the cyber sea, if you’re young, white and hate giving BJs. What do you think? Is it worth the possible rejection? Do we all deserve a lifetime of not getting laid because we’re superficial, racially unenlightened jerks?

Today in online dating: men are “ageist,” everyone’s racist is a post from: The Inquisitr

Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist, has noticed some significant, promising changes trending since March.

Unemployment searches are down, real estate searches are up, and temporary employment (which often is a pre-indicator for a recovery in the permanent kind) is improving, for starters. Varian, who joined Google seven years ago to help design their now $21 billion yearly ad business, was in Washington last week to entice the government to use Google to “better draw current snapshots of consumer sentiment, corporate health and social interests.” Which would be incredibly useful if they’re not doing it already- people are notoriously poor at providing accurate information about themselves, whether through intentional means (lying), misunderstanding questions, or optimism, for example. But Google doesn’t lie. Statistical data drawn from user search trends and habits are much less likely to reflect prejudice or misinformation provided by those being profiled based on that criteria.

Varian points to the “cash for clunkers” short-sightedness that has drawn much critique. Had the government used data from Google metrics to gauge interest in the program, he says, perhaps they may have known the money would run out as quickly as it did. While Varian’s conclusions may not differ all that much from those being drawn by non-Googling economists, the mere fact that the statistical data mined from Google is so rich and nuanced is reason alone that the search engine’s data is valuable to show us what is and possibly, what is to be.

In perhaps the most reassuring prediction I’ve seen so far, Varian believes recovery is coming. He Googled it.

With more stability in the economy, Varian said more help for private companies, such as tax incentives, could help spur an earnest recovery.

“On the other hand, I would hesitate to say we need any more major initiatives at this point,” he said. “The die is cast and things seem to be moving in the right direction. Let’s stay the course.”

[Source: The Washington Post]

Google searches indicate economy is recovering. Slowly. is a post from: The Inquisitr

I ran across this wide ranging set of statistics for Twitter the other day full of bullet points and some really pretty looking graphs. So I figured that since it was a pretty boring Saturday (so far) I’d share some of the bullet points and maybe a few of the prettier graphs – even the pie charts ones because we all know that there’s nothing like a a bit of pie chart pr0n to make the afternoon go by.

The information comes from a study of Twitter by a company called Sysomos Inc and if you want the full report you can head over here to check it out. In the meantime here’s the short form of their report that came from analyzing some 11 million Twitter accounts. These bullet points are from the report summary:

• 72.5% of all users joining during the first five months of 2009.
• 85.3% of all Twitter users post less than one update/day
• 21% of users have never posted a Tweet
• 93.6% of users have less than 100 followers, while 92.4% follow less than 100 people.
• 5% of Twitter users account for 75% of all activity
• New York has the most Twitters users, followed by Los Angeles, Toronto, San Francisco and Boston; while Detroit was the fast-growing city over the first five months of 2009
• More than 50% of all updates are published using tools, mobile and Web-based, other than Twitter.com. TweetDeck is the most popular non-Twitter.com tool with 19.7% market share.
• There are more women on Twitter (53%) than men (47%)
• Of the people who identify themselves as marketers, 15% follow more than 2,000 people. This compares with 0.29% of overall Twitter users who follow more than 2,000 people.

and here’s a few of their Fast Facts with accompanying charts.

Fast Fact: the US is the biggest Twitter country by population, followed by the UK, Canada and Australia

Fast Fact: 92.4% of Twitter users follow less than 100 people, while 97.8% of Twitter users follow less that 400 people. At the other end of the extreme, 0.94% of Twitter users follow more than 1,000 people.

Fast Fact: As many people have speculated, a small group of Twitter users account for the bulk of activity. Sysomos discovered that 5% of users account for 75% of all activity, 10% account for 86% of activity, and the top 30% account for 97.4%.

Now for a bit of fun stats – the most common keywords in Twitter profiles

And on the marketer side of things here’s the most common keywords in their Twitter profiles

thanks to the good folks at Sysomos for a nice in-depth look at Twitter and the resulting data in their report.

Some more Twitter stats for those stataholics out there is a post from: The Inquisitr

A lot of folks who run web sites, blogs or other such web services stats junkies. Being able to see what is happening traffic wise is something that they just can’t get enough of. The problem is that after awhile they all start to look the same, after all there are only so many ways that you can graph the numbers that come streaming in.

Enter the Emotional Statistics bowl.

The bowl is a different way of displaying your web traffic in that it uses flashing diodes to represent how deeply your visitors are going into your site. If you also sell things via your site the center of the bowel will light up when someone has made a purchase.

Different lights and positions in the bowl shows whether the visitor came by search referral, regular referral, ad referral or directly. The different colors also indicate if the visitor is a repeat user – green for newbies and white for repeat visitors.

The only thing you have to be careful is that someone doesn’t mistake it for a cool soup bowl.

[via SlipperyBrick / pictures courtesy of Yanko Design]

A super bowl for your web stats is a post from: The Inquisitr