Google's Android platform is having little trouble holding onto its No. 1 spot in the U.S. in terms of the number of mobile subscribers. According to comScore's mobile subscriber market share report for the month of November 2011, there were 234 million Americas age 13 and older who used mobile devices for the three-month average period ending in November, many of which are turning to Android.
A strong Christmas push helped propel U.S. online holiday spending to $35.3 billion this year, up 15 percent versus 2010, according to market research firm comScore. U.S. consumers hopped online and spent $2.8 billion in the week leading up to Christmas day, marking a 16 percent increase over the same week one year ago.
Tis the season to spend, spend, and spend some more, and it doesn't look like online shoppers are having any trouble doing that, and then some. According to Internet marketing research company comScore, holiday retail e-commerce spending for the first 46 days of the November to December 2011 season is $30.9 billion to date, up 15 percent compared to the same period one year ago.
In this day and age of the Internet, it seems increasingly silly and obsolete to awake at an ungodly hour, stumble out of bed, drive across town in the cold, camp out in a long line, and then make a mad dash to the electronics section hoping you don't get trampled to death in the process, all in the name of Black Friday. Some of the best deals are only found in brick-and-mortar stores, that's true, but online shoppers are proving to be more than just a group of also-rans.
Google is the big man on campus when it comes to search and it's said the bigger they are, the harder they fall. Unfortunately for Microsoft, Yahoo, and everyone else trying to carve a larger slice of the search pie, a little slip by Google here and there doesn't add up to anything close to a fall. Does it really matter that Google is the only search player out of the top three to give up a bit of market share?
Google+ is pretty rad. It has a Twitter element, in that you can follow others and have others follow you without being linked together as friends, and it hasn't been around long enough to pick up some of Facebook's bad habits, like bungled policy controls. But for all of its potential, Facebook is still the No. 1 social site on the planet and it's showing no signs of slowing down.
Haters been hating on Google+. Sure, maybe it's just the Goog's attempt to draw advertisee eyeballs from Facebook, and okay, the invite system kinda sucks, and yeah, sometimes it feels like you're talking to yourself in a big, empty room. Those are all perfectly valid complaints. But G+ brings a lot of new things to the table, and despite the naysayers, an unprecedented number of people have been lining up to give the service a whirl. We're only one month in to the Google+ experience and 25 million visitors have already tested the waters.
With or without your participation, Google+ just keeps growing at a record rate, and it appears the social networking site has officially breached the 20 million members mark, at least unofficially. Confused? Google isn't reporting that number -- not yet anyway -- but market research firm comScore is, which we can take as a more reliable metric than Ancestry.com co-founder Paul Allen's formula for measuring Google+'s growth.
In its "Do No Evil" quest to become the entire Internet, Google hit a milestone in May that no other website has ever hit before. Just when you thought that the company couldn't possibly attract new visitors simply because everybody and his sister already used the service – no one searches the Web anymore, after all, they Google it – the Internet giant became the first website to ever have 1 billion unique visitors in a month.
New numbers from Comscore indicate the demise of MySpace is happening faster than most had expected. Between January and February 2011, MySpace lost 14.4% of its monthly users. In raw numbers, that's a drop to 63 million from 73 million. They had twice this many users a year ago.Connect with MaximumPC
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