Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Opera Affirms Popularity of Social Networks

Everyone knows that Social Networks are the biggest phenomenon of Web 2.0. Facebook, Orkut and MySpace is on everyone's online list. Opera today affirmed Opera that Social Networks are the most visited websites by people using mobile phones. According to the latest figures released by Opera, traffic to social networks comprise almost 40% of the mobile web.

opera_server Opera Mini is the most popular web browser on the mobile phone and is available on all kinds of platforms. Opera Mini is free and comes pre-installed on a lot of mobile devices. Opera renders webpages through an innovative technology. Opera's mobile software uses a remote server to pre-process Web pages before sending them to your phone. Web content is compressed to reduce the size of data transfers, enabling fast browsing experience at low costs even on simpler phones. By doing this, Opera Mini is able to display the web page as it is viewable through a desktop browser, but decreases the size of the images. This makes webpages to load faster and costs less to people who have limited data services on mobile phones.

Opera Mini thus provides information to Opera's servers on what websites are being accessed. Thus, today's report can be considered to be pretty accurate. I have been using the latest release of Opera Mini 4.1 for the past few days and its been a very good browsing experience.

Another interesting thing to notice from the report is that people still visit a lot of .mobi and WAP websites. It accounts for 23% of the traffic. But Opera mentions that this number is on the decrease and people are moving to the full web experience.

As far as India goes:

Snapshot: India favors social networking, with nearly half (48.9%) of all traffic going to social networks.
  1. www.orkut.com
  2. www.google.com 
  3. in.m.yahoo.com
  4. www.peperonity.com
  5. gallery.mobile9.com
  6. www.mocospace.com
  7. www.160by2.com
  8. www.mobango.com
  9. www.itsmy.com
  10. www.indianrail.gov.in

http://peperonity.com seems to be the surprise. Didn't know that this site was so popular for mobile users in India as well as from all around the world. Indonesia and U.S mobile users are the biggest users of social network. 63% of opera mini users surf these websites and it comes as no surprise that people now use the mobile device, just like they use their PCs.

With newer internet devices coming, newer processors being created for such devices, newer mobile operating systems coming up... the mobile web is surely the next big thing in the world of technology.

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