Even though he is working on a digital media minor, Matt Erwin doesn't understand the hype about MySpace and Facebook, two of the most popular communication sites on the Web.
"I use Facebook and MySpace solely for social reasons, for maybe an hour per week combined," said Erwin, sophomore music technology major. "Other people get so into it, with blogs and notes, that it becomes their entire social interaction."
Some people, however, can spend hours on sites like MySpace, which topped one media company's list of most time-consuming sites on the Web with nearly 60 million users last month.
According to a January study by compete.com, a media site that measures Web use, MySpace commands 11.9 percent of the attention of all Web surfers. Facebook came in eighth on the list of 200, using up almost 1 percent of Web surfers' time.
The figures come from Compete, Inc.'s recent creation of Attention 200, a program that measures the 200 sites on which Internet users spend the most time out of the top 1 million Web sites. Attention 200 develops a new list each month and was created because Web developers wanted a better way to measure the performance of their sites, said managing director TJ Mahony in an article announcing the program on compete.com's Web site.
"Attention is an incredibly powerful way to plan and measure the Web because it is finite, and we manage it selfishly," Mahony said in the article. "We grant our attention to people, activities and Web sites that merit receiving our most precious resource - our time."
Other sites in Attention 200's top 10 include yahoo.com, msn.com, ebay.com, google.com, aol.com, pogo.com, amazon.com and craigslist.com.
MySpace jumped into its No. 1 position from seventh in a December study by Compete of the top 20 sites on the Web. Facebook did not make the December list at all.
One of the reasons sites like MySpace and Facebook are able to top lists is because they can be used while multitasking, a phenomenon that teens and adults are practicing more and more. Users leave MySpace and Facebook windows open all day to get alerts from the sites. More than 80 percent of the time U.S. adults spend on the Internet, they are involved in another activity at the same time, according to Ball State University's Center for Media Design.
According to Compete's snapshot of MySpace, the average stay for MySpace users is 29 minutes each time they log on to the site. The average number of pages each user looks at is 75.6.
There is no way for Ball State to tell how its users rank among national users because the university has no means for tracking student Web site use, said Fred Nay, director of University Computing Services.
Erwin said he thought the sites could hinder students' and adults' face-to-face social skills if people use them as their primary way of communicating.
"People I communicate with via these media know my personality from outside of these sites, but some people judge personality based only on what they see on these sites," he said.
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