Americans spend over 900 hundred million hours on social networks and blogs per month, 43 percent more time than they did last year, according to Nielsen.

As you can tell from all the Zynga coverage, online gaming is another quickly growing category, rising in total usage time by 10 percent year-over-year. In fact, online gaming overtook email — which dropped several percentage points in use — to become the second most heavily used category.

More than one-third of internet time is spent on social networks, blogs, personal email and instant messaging services.

“Despite the almost unlimited nature of what you can do on the web, 40 percent of U.S. online time is spent on just three activities – social networking, playing games and emailing leaving a whole lot of other sectors fighting for a declining share of the online pie,” said Nielsen analyst Dave Martin.

It would be nice if Nielsen were to stop putting social networking sites and blogs together in the same category. This categorization made sense a few years ago, but now the two are so totally different that it’s time to separate them, as it confuses the results of studies like these.

While Web 2.0 rules the fixed web, Web 1 is the king of the mobile internet. Almost half of mobile internet time is spent emailing (twenty-five minutes out of a total hour), and social networks and blogs are accessed only a quarter of this time, just a little over six minutes per hour.

Here are some of Nielsen’s other findings:

• Of the most heavily-used sectors, videos/movies was the only other to experience a significant growth in share of U.S. activity online. Its share of activity grew relatively by 12 percent from 3.5 to 3.9 percent. June 2010 was a major milestone for U.S. online video as the number of videos streamed passed the 10 billion mark. The average American consumer streaming online video spent 3 hours 15 minutes doing so during the month.

• Despite some predictions otherwise, the rise of social networking hasn’t pushed email and instant messaging into obscurity just yet. Although both saw double-digit declines in share of time, email remains as the third heaviest activity online (8.3 percent share of time) while instant messaging is fifth, accounting for four percent of Americans online time.

• Although the major portals also experienced a double digit decline in share, they remained as the fourth heaviest activity, accounting for 4.4 percent of U.S. time online.

The latest study from the Nielsen company shows that social networking is becoming the number one activity on the Web in terms of time spent, averaging five-and-a-half hours per user per month in December 2009. It’s 82% more time than one year ago and is still growing. It’s interesting to note that the other biggest time-consuming activities on the web are blogs, IM and online gaming: these are all about connections between people. The growth of status updating (as 33% of social network users already update their status at least one time a week according to Forrester’s latest study) with Facebook and Twitter as stars will create a new web within the World Wide Web.

Two examples to confirm this evolution: the experiment “Behind closed doors on the Net,” led by French-Canadian radio journalists, should conclude the same thing: even if it’s not perfect, the new kind of interaction and sharing provided by social networking makes sense and can become a new level of knowledge and comprehension of the world. The second example is the latest moves by the two big players in search, Google and Microsoft, which signed agreements with Twitter and/or Facebook to integrate the feeds in their results and make money out of this new kind of data.

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I spend infinitely more time on social networks in 2009 than I did in 2008, as did most people, according to Nielsen.

Globally, time spent on social networks increased an average of 2.5 hours per month between December 2008 and December 2009, a growth of 82 percent year-over-year, the research firm announced last Friday.

In December of 2008, people spent an average of just under 3 hours and 4 minutes per month on social networks; in December 2009, the total time jumped to 5 hours and 35 minutes per month.

Obviously, Facebook accounts for most of this time, but it’s amazing to see that the amount of time spent on social networks since the days of static MySpace pages. Sixty-seven percent of global internet users visited Facebook last year, and those who use the site end up spending more than six hours per month on it.

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In the last five years, the number of people 65 and over using the internet has increased 55 percent, according to Nielsen.

“The over 65 crowd represents about 13% of the total population and with this increase in online usage, they are beginning to catch up with their offline numbers,” said Nielsen’s Chuck Shilling.

“Looking at what they’re doing online, it makes sense they’re engaged in many of the same activities that dominate other age segments – e-mail, sharing photos, social networking, checking out the latest news and weather – and it’s worth noting that a good percentage of them are spending time with age-appropriate pursuits such as leisure travel, personal health care and financial concerns,” Shilling said.

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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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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 easy to forget how recently that video became the ubiquitous media of choice on the Web. Just in the span of 2005 through 2006 came the popular proliferation of YouTube in the US, DailyMotion in Europe, and Tudou in China. These sites set the direction of online video with Flash Player technology for streaming instead of downloading, with a simple interface where anyone can upload content, as well as convenient code for sharing and reposting on Web pages and blogs.

According to Lightspeed’s research released yesterday through eMarketer, video is bigger than blogging or social networking - 72 percent of US Internet users watch video clips at least once a month. 62 percent view at least one video per week, which Lightspeed translates to 97 million weekly viewers.

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Social network usage passed email in February, according to Nielsen. Social networking sites had a global reach of 68.4 percent that month, compared to email’s reach of 64.8 percent.

In a three-month period from December 2008 to February 2009, social networking sites grew 1.6 percent, while email reach actually declined 0.3 percent.

One of the key drivers to social media reach was mobile. Mobile social networking nearly tripled in 2008.

The report also gives hard figures on another trend which, like mobile, is based less on sociological whims than it is on the price of the technology needed to participate: the growing number of users of long-form video sites like Hulu.

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The average American adult spends eight and a half hours a day in front of a screen, whether it’s on a computer, TV, mobile phone or other gadget.

Users who spend the most time in front of a screen are those in the 45-54 age group, who dedicate nine and a half hours to this per day.

These are the results of a new study by the Nielsen-funded Council for Research Excellence (CRE) and Ball State University’s Center for Media Design (CMD).

TV is still the main media activity, followed in descending popularity by computers, radio and print media.

The report finds that the average American spends 142.5 minutes daily in front of a computer, which is dwarfed by TV’s 353.1 minutes. PC users spend almost as much time working with software (46.1 minutes) as they do on the Web (48.8 minutes).

The report doesn’t make clear if the software is installed on PCs or in the cloud.

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