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"Back in July, we reported that Facebook had become the Internet\u2019s ultimate time waster, with users spending an average of 4 hours, 39 minutes on it per month, more than any other site on the Web.\nSince then, however, that number has only gone up.  According to numbers from Nielsen Online, users spent an average of 5 hours, 46 minutes on Facebook in the month of August.  To put that in perspective, that\u2019s triple the amount of time they spent on Google!In fact, the next closest site in Nielsen\u2019s top 10 is Yahoo, which, despite still having huge traffic in time consuming areas like news, sports, and financial data, could only get users to stick around for 3 hours and 14 minutes on average during the month.  YouTube, surprisingly, only occupied 1 hour and 17 minutes of the average user\u2019s time.\n\n\n\n\nOf course, one of Google\u2019s stated philosophies is that they \u201Cmay be the only people in the world who can say our goal is to have people leave our homepage as quickly as possible.\u201D  However, that ethos was set in stone long before users started spending an inordinate amount of time on social sites \u2013 sites that now want to compete in search.  \nFor now, Google\u2019s answer seems to be extending its reach in search through other products \u2013 primarily its Chrome web browser and upcoming OS.  But not having a strong presence in social networking remains the company\u2019s Achilles' heel, becoming ever more apparent as Facebook pulls away from the pack in usage stats.  \nImage courtesy of iStockphoto, hidesy"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2009/09/17/facebook-google-time-spent/>