Social Media Minute: Privacy Issues with Google Buzz, Twitter Breaks 1 Billion Tweets Per Month

By Jason Harris (@harrisja) Feb 10, 2010

2 comments

Social media moves so fast, it's hard to keep up. Here are the week's top stories in scan-friendly format:

British Mobile Users Are Crazy About Facebook
Twitter Users Tweet More Than 1 Billion Times Per Month
Google Buzz Presents Scary Privacy Issues, a la Facebook
Is Blogging For Old People?

British Mobile Users Are Crazy About Facebook

According to the GSMA, a global cellular trade group, 16 million users in the United Kingdom hopped on the internet via their mobile phones in December 2009. These folks spent 4.8 billion minutes online and viewed around 6.7 billion web pages while doing so. Looking deeper in the data, it is apparent that Facebook is a very poplar site amongst British mobile users, racking up about 2.2 billion of those minutes. This is roughly 1/2 of all total minutes browsing web content!

Running second place in all web content being browsed is Google site, at 395 million minutes and Microsoft sites tallied up about 165 million minutes of browsing activity.

These data points show a British population who are very excited about browsing the mobile web. Even more impressive, only 30% of mobile customers in the UK have smart phones, so those who do have smart phones are generating some remarkable usage statistics. It makes sense that much of the use is centered around social networking, as this goes along with other studies explored here on CMSWire and specifically the Social Media Minute.

Twitter Users Tweet More Than 1 Billion Times Per Month

On this blog, we have covered Twitter and the rise and fall of its growth over the years. Many data points have made us think that Twitter's growth has either stalled or is falling, depending on how you evaluate the data. A new study out today from Pingdom shows a remarkable milestone and also points to further growth on the micro-blogging service. For the first time, in the month of December last year, Twitter served more than 1 billion (with a b) tweets. In January, the number jumped to a remarkable 1.2 billion tweets, which equals out to be about 40 million per day.

More interesting data points: between January 2009 and January 2010, Twitter served 16 times more tweets. Also, Twitter's daily activity has doubled since August 2009.

These usage numbers are quite astounding and show some real growth for Twitter. Combined with the report last week that showed how inactive most Twitter users are, it seems the active ones are tweeting at a very high volume.

Also, I think the Twitter activity has to do with the myriad of social services that use the Twitter API to broadcast information, such as Foursquare with location updates and blogs who tweet whenever a user updates a blog post.

Google Buzz Presents Scary Privacy Issues, a la Facebook

Last week we covered Facebook's privacy issues with some recent changes the social networking company made to the way status updates are sent and who can view them. Yesterday, Google unveiled Google Buzz, a way to see status messages from your friends, tied to a map so you can also see Buzz messages (I'll call them buzzes from here on out) from those around you or in a specific geographic region. Think of a cross between Foursquare, Twitter and Friendfeed, and you have Buzz.