Technology, Web Traffic | featured news

This may go down as the year that social networking trumped searching as America's favorite online pastime. In 2010, Facebook pushed past Google to become the most popular site on the Internet for the first time, according to two Web tracking firms. The title caps a year of rapid ascent for Facebook in which the social network hit 500 million users and founder Mark Zuckerberg was named Time magazine's Person of the Year. It also marks another milestone in the ongoing shift in the way Americans spend their time online, a social change that profoundly alters how people get news and interact with one another - and even the definition of the word "friend."

Instagram, a photo-sharing social network, announced Tuesday that it had passed 1 million registered users in just two months.

The founders of Zagat Survey hope that the rise of apps will help prove its pay model correct... But in the next breath, most of them wonder why Zagat hasn’t won on the Web. The review site Yelp, for example, which made its debut in 2004, draws much more traffic.

The internet is growing fast, but Google is growing even faster. According to online security company Arbor Networks, Google now represents an average 6.4 percent of all internet traffic.

Twitter’s number of monthly unique visitors finally surpassed that of MySpace in August. Though it ranked third among social networking sites, Twitter ranked #50 in the list of top 50 properties overall. The numbers were crunched by the marketing research firm comScore.

When it comes to releasing a new product, users and pundits’ opinions only count for so much, but numbers — including revenue and traffic– don’t lie... This week, the web analysts at Hitwise gathered data showing a 34% decline in visitors in the U.K. and a 24% decline in the U.S. in the past 11 weeks.

According to Nielsen data out this morning Microsoft's Bing has passed Yahoo to become the number two search engine in the US. Nielsen says that Google's August share is 65% (and growth is flat) but that Bing and Yahoo have now switched places.

More ocean-spanning cable lines will be needed to string together the Internet. In five to seven years, for example, the transatlantic fiber optic cables linking the United States to Europe will run out of capacity.

Facebook has more users than ever, says comScore. With its most recent privacy backlash seemingly behind it, Facebook surged ahead to a new traffic record in the U.S. during the month of June. According to comScore, the social network pulled in more than 141 million unique visitors in the U.S. during the month, beating its previous record (set in May) by better than 11 million.