Mobile Social Networking Grows Substantially, Says Opera

By Editor Wireless and Mobile News on January 22, 2009 12:09 PM

Opera's latest State of the Mobile Web examined social networks. In this month's report, Opera reviewed the top social networks in key countries.

Globally the top 10 social networks for Opera Mini users are (ranked by unique users):

1. vkontakte.ru - 909.17% growth in 2008
2. facebook.com - 693.11% growth in 2008
3. friendster.com - 670.13% growth in 2008
4. orkut.com - 296.78% growth in 2008
5. odnoklassniki.ru - 545.40% growth in 2008
6. peperonity.com - 396.65% growth in 2008
7. hi5.com - 372.60% growth in 2008
8. myspace.com - 618.42% growth in 2008
9. mamba.ru - 1055.51% growth in 2008
10. mocospace.com - 834.89% growth in 2008

In the United States, Facebook edged out MySpace thanks to an impressive growth rate during the year, with unique users growing 1632%, while MySpace user growth was almost 52%.

Facebook continued its impressive performance in English-speaking countries. In the United Kingdom, Facebook gained 536% to become the most visited social network for Opera Mini users. South Africa also had Facebook as its top social network. Outside of the anglophone world, Facebook had impressive performance in Egypt as usage jumped more than 3400%.

All was not lost for MySpace, however. In Germany, MySpace was the strongest of all the social networks, growing 492% in 2008.

Just as on the wired Web, Orkut was the most popular in India and Brazil, while Nasza-klasa was the most popular in Poland. This further underscores Opera's belief that there is only One Web, which is accessed through a variety of devices.
Supporting quotes

"Social networks are helping drive sustained growth of One Web," said Jon von Tetzchner, CEO, Opera. "Despite prevailing economic conditions, we expect the use of the Web through mobile devices will continue to grow in 2009. More people want access to the Web on a global scale. With extra capacity in both developed and developing nations, we expect to see more people come online using a mobile phone than any other device."

Other stats noted in the report were:

Opera Mini users viewed more than than 6.4 billion pages in December. Since November, page views have gone up 13.0%.
Opera Mini users generated more than 93.8 million MB of data for operators worldwide.
Since November, the data consumed went up by 13.2%. Data in Opera Mini is compressed 90% on average. If this data were uncompressed, Opera Mini users would have viewed over 938 million MB of data in December.