Women’s presence on social networks is far greater than that of men, according to Pingdom’s demographic study of 19 social networking sites.

Eighty-seven percent of social networks have more female users than males. Those with the highest percentage of female users are Bebo, MySpace, Classmates, Xanga, Ning and Twitter.

Two-thirds of Bebo’s users are female, while MySpace and Classmates have close to that (64 percent each).

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For the last six or so months I’ve been running on the assumption that social networks were replacing email.

Like most every opinion I have, this belief turned out to be completely unfounded and untrue.

Researchers at Nielsen believed the same thing and created a study to test this hypothesis. And their early findings show that the opposite is true:the more people use social media, the more time they spend on email, too.

The email use of high and medium social media consumers has jumped between April 2008 and 2009. In fact, the email use of high social media consumers has more than doubled in that time, increasing more than 100 minutes a month to just under 190 minutes in April 2009.

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The amount of times spent of social networks has tripled in the last year, according to Nielsen (PDF).

A year ago, users spent 6 percent of their online time on social networks, but as of August 2009, time spent on social networks now represents 17 percent of total internet use.

“This growth suggests a wholesale change in the way the Internet is used,” said Nielsen’s Jon Gibs.

“While video and text content remain central to the Web experience – the desire of online consumers to connect, communicate and share is increasingly driving the medium’s growth,” Gibs said.

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A few years back, at an old job in a state far, far away, one of my fellow co-workers was fired because of a post she made on MySpace.

Wherein she threatened to put laxative in our coffee.

A long HR battle ensued, the main point of contention being whether what she had MySpaced (didn’t it look like I just wrote in Sanskrit there?) was technically in the public or private realm.

A few years later, we all know the answer to that question. Every week there’s a new Facebook/Twitter firing or faux pas, the latest that I know of being when a California Pizza Kitchen employee criticized his company’s uniform switch.

With human resources departments increasingly having to deal with social-network-related problems, there still isn’t any consensus on how to treat social-networking job infractions.

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In the last six months, the number of high school and college students using Facebook has declined 16.5 and 21.7 percent respectively, while the numbers of users over the age of 55 has shot up 513.7 percent, according to iStrategyLabs.

Are young people switching to new social networking sites? Has Twitter become a Facebook to Facebook’s MySpace? Is the study fundamentally flawed, or are the numbers simply skewed because the kids are on summer break?

There has been a lot of controversy about iStrategyLabs’ findings, but they’re interesting, nonetheless.

Incidentally, while this study was circulating through the Webs, we had a large group (50+) of French telecommunications students at L’Atelier today. To a one, they are all on Facebook.

None are on Twitter.

The time people spend on social networks has grown 82 percent year-over-year between May 2008 and 2009, according to Nielsen.

The average time per person has grown 62 percent in that period.

Twitter’s still the fastest growing of the group, though before the Iran elections growth was beginning to slow down, actually declining one percent in April.

The average time spent on the microblogging service has nearly tripled year-over-year, growing from an average of 6 minutes and 19 seconds in May 2008 to 17 minutes and 21 seconds in May 2009, an increase of 175 percent.

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It’s been coming for what seems forever now – Facebook finally overtook MySpace.

ComScore reports that the milestone was reached in May, with Facebook growing to 70.278 million unique visitors while MySpace fell to 70.255 million.

Facebook gained 2.8 million unique U.S. visitors last month while MySpace lost 500,000. If Facebook integrates a good music service, MySpace will be done.

Year-over-year, Facebook grew 97 percent from 2008 while the MySpace audience shrunk 5 percent. In the same period, Twitter has grown 2700, though earlier this month Compete reported that Twitter adoption had flatlined in May, stopping its astounding 2009 growth.

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Facebook seems to have taken the place of honor for most popular social networking site. But the Palo Alto company is looking to the functionality of MySpace in a move that will take effect this Saturday.

Usernames are coming to Facebook, and this might not affect thousands of casual Internet users that happen to utilize this social service. For the rest of us, we can finally have an easily promotable, bloggable, embeddable account URL, just like we used to have at MySpace.

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If Facebook continues to grow at its current pace, it will be bigger than Google in just a few years, says RBC Capital Markets analyst Ross Sandler.

Sandler expects the social networking site to have more unique visitors than Google by 2011 or 2012, if both sites grow as he projects.

Sandler predicts 85 percent annual growth for Facebook and 20 percent for Google.

Facebook is already starting to drive more traffic to some sites than Google does, according to a recent article in Advertising Age. So will social networking take a chunk out of the search giant? Not right now.

In fact, the opposite is occurring.

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11 percent of online US adults use Twitter or similar status updates, according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project. (pdf)

The 11 percent in December 2008 nearly double’s the total of a half year before, as only 6 percent had sent a Twitter-like communiqué in May of Last year. In fact, the percentage of people sending status updates grew 2 percent between November and December alone.

As expected, status updates are most used by younger users. 19 percent of those in the 18-24 group have used Twitter or a similar service, and 20 percent of those in the 25 to 34 group have.

This is a much different world than the one last year, in which Zappo’s Tony Hsieh was told by a group of students at Indiana University (my alma mater – Go Big Red!), that Twitter “was only for old people.”

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