Social networks popular among mobile Opera users

People using mobile phones to browse the web are mostly using social networking sites, according to an analysis of traffic data published by Opera on Tuesday. The Norwegian browser vendor studied the sites visited using its Opera Mini service to find the 100 most popular web sites in various countries. In order to improve speed, web sites visited with Opera Mini are stored on the vendor's own servers so they can be prepared for mobile use before the browser visits them. The data used for the analysis were collected anonymously from the servers from January to March 2008.

Opera found that 40 per cent of the web sites visited worldwide with Opera Mini were social networks. The share of community sites is far higher in the US, South Africa, and Singapore, exceeding 60 per cent. Search engines, such as Google and Yahoo, are also very popular among Mini users, as are information and entertainment sites. Opera also found that WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) sites are being used less and less and now only make up 23 per cent of the sites visited, with 77 per cent being normal web sites.

UK mobile owners turn out to be the most intensive email users, with email applications making up 11 per cent of traffic. The most popular web site in the UK was Facebook, followed by Google and Microsoft's Live. Another social network, Bebo, came in fourth. Sixty-three per cent of the web sites visited in the US were social networks. The top web site was MySpace, followed by Google, Mocospace, Yahoo and Facebook.

In March of 2008, some 11.9 million people used Opera Mini on their mobile devices to visit a total of 2.2 billion websites. The total data volume amounted to 33 million megabytes. The analysis of surfer behaviour was based on data collected in the UK, Germany, the US, Russia, China, Indonesia, India, Poland, South Africa, and Ukraine. Traffic from deals with network operators, such as T-Mobile or Vodafone, was not counted. The survey will be repeated at regular intervals.

(trk)