Fresh social-Web & Net numbers

If Facebook were a country, it would be the world's third most populous one, after China and India. As for the world's most avid social networkers, Americans are 4th, behind Australians, Britons, and Italians, respectively – The Economist reports in a special report on social networking – followed by users in South Korea, Spain, Brazil, Germany, France, and Japan. The world's most popular social sites are Facebook, Windows Live, MySpace, Chinese portal Baidu, Twitter, Google's social site Orkut (popular in Brazil and India), Hi5, Chinese social site QQ, LinkedIn, and art community site DeviantArt – in that order, based on 10/09 comScore figures and all based in the US unless otherwise indicated. Other big indigenous communities include "Skyrock in France, VKontakte in Russia, and Cyworld in South Korea, as well as numerous smaller social networks that appeal to specific interests such as Muxlim, aimed at the world's Muslims, and ResearchGATE, which connects scientists and researchers." Meanwhile, Nielsen reports that social network sites are the most popular Web destination worldwide, with FB representing 67% of all social site traffic, Mashable.com reports. As for general Internet numbers for 2009, Pingdom.com has some: e.g., 90 trillion emails went out last year (247 billion a day, on average); there were 234 million Web sites as of this past December; and 1.73 Net users as of last September (see that page for more).