Nielsen just recently released a report on a longitudinal study of 200,000 American Internet users from from June 2009 to June 2010. The report shows that social networks now dominate 22.7% of users’ time on the Internet. This was an increase of 43% since last year! The second most time consuming activity on the Internet is online gaming which sits at only 10.2%. Interestingly, its good to see that traditional forms of communication such as emailing and instant messaging haven’t become obsolete yet. They still account for the 3rd and 5th most time consuming activities on the web.

These were results for desktop Internet users. Nielsen’s report also covered American mobile Internet activities. As you can see in the following diagram, email actually occupies a majority of American’s mobile Internet time, whereas social networks is third on the list.

Personally this statistic is not all that surprising as emailing was one of the first online activities available on cell phones. And as we talked about in this post, currently only 21% of the phones in the States are smartphones. This would imply that only a small number of mobile users can access social networks on the go. Again, I believe this trend will definitely change within a few years as more and more consumers adopt a smart phone.

The interesting question we’re left with is this: What kind of impact will this have on all other activities online (on desktops)? Will we continue to see significant decreases in time spent on activities such as emailing?