A recent Nielsen study confirms that the way users spend their time online is changing. The most notable change is the rise in use of social media portal sites which now uses up 23% of the time that Americans are online and the most popular of social media site used is Facebook.

With the rise of social media, something must give and it appears that email has taken the hit declining by 4% this year, leveling off to 8% of the time that users are online. Although desktop email usage has seen a decline, mobile email usage is increasing now at 42%, up 5% from last year. Also taking a hit are the search engines like Google and Yahoo as users are relying on social media to provide direct links to real time information. To give an example of just how popular social media has become, it was just over this past weekend that Twitter reported that it has surpassed the 20 billion tweet mark.

Via: Ubergizmo