Insanely Social

Zuckerberg's email spawns a few stats which nicely express our continuous trend towards digitalisation;

■ There are now more than 500 million active Facebook users, with 50% logging on to the site on any given day. Worldwide, users collectively spend 700 billion minutes a month on Facebook.

■ Google's email service Gmail ended July with 186 million worldwide users, a 22% increase from the same time a year ago. Both Microsoft's Windows Hotmail (nearly 346 million users) and Yahoo's email (303 million users) are larger, but aren't growing as rapidly.

■ As of September, Twitter, which launched in 2006, had 175 million registered users posting an estimated 95 million tweets each day.

■ There are now more than five billion mobile phone connections worldwide. In many regions, penetration exceeds 100%, meaning more than one connection per person. Research earlier this year found that teenagers in American now use text as their main method of communication, with more than 30% of US teens sending more than 100 texts a day.

■ More than 25% of the UK's population – some 16 million people – accessed the internet from mobile phones in December 2009. Nearly half those total minutes online via mobile devices were spent at Facebook Mobile – 2.2bn minutes out of 4.8bn – with Google on 400m in a very distant second.

To follow this trend home head to http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/nov/21/facebook-email-instant-messaging-zuckerberg