Interesting Facts

According to online measurement body UKOM, Facebook attracted more visitors in the UK than Microsoft. (Yes Facebook had 26.8 million visitors in Britain in May 2011, beating the 26.2 million who visited Microsoft's MSN, Windows and Bing sites combined.  Google is still top of the pile with 33.9 million visitors, whilst Twitter's UK audience was just 6.1 million.  I dread to think how much heat their servers produce coping with all those visitors.)

As many as 60% of online profiles are fake. (This is especially common on dating sites, where member's profiles often feature stock images found on the internet, sometimes of pornography actresses or models. But it's not always the person featured in the profile who lies. An Englishman was featured in a fake gay profile by a so called friend, but he had the last laugh as he was awarded $45,000 in a libel case he brought against the former friend. Of course, I would never lie on my profile.)

According to Google Ad Planner, Facebook.com is visited monthly by 540 million people, or slightly more than 35 percent of the Internet population. (This makes Facebook king of the Internet, followed, not so closely by, Yahoo.com which gets a measly 490 million visitors per month. It all makes me feel so small and insignificant.)

According the the UK Online Measurement company (UKOM) British web surfers are spending 65% more of their time online than they did 3 years ago. (Your average surfer in the UK spends 22 hours and 15 minutes on the net each month. All I can say is "lightweights".)

According to a study carried out at the University of Leeds in the UK, excessive internet use is associated with depression. (The study, published in the journal Psychopathology, found that 1.2% of people surveyed could be classed as "internet addicts", and many of these were depressed. But they couldn't figure out if the depression was caused by excessive internet use, or if depressed people just use the internet a lot?)

France and Germany have issued warnings to web users to find an alternative to Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) in order to protect security. (A recent attack on Google exploited the vulnerability in IE6 , but now the malicious code, which has been implicated in those attacks, has been published online, so it's only a matter of time before other versions of IE are exploited too. What I want to know is, why was Google using IE? Oh I know why, it's because Chrome keeps reporting sites as unavailable (even their own) although I guess that's really good security.)

Official statistics in the UK say that 29% of women have never used the internet, but only 20% of men. (I wonder why that might be.)