Facebook Accounts for 44 Percent of Online Sharing

Facebook is slowly taking over 'sharing' on the web. In fact, it's getting close to dominating this activity thanks, in no small part, to its ever-increasing size. According to AddThis, a popular sharing widget, 44 percent of the people that shared something on the web did it on Facebook rather than via any other means.

The company created a telling infographic, detailing some of the more stand-out stats of the year. While Facebook is indeed the preferred method, and it's actually becoming more popular, there are other interesting trends as well.

In 2009, 33 percent of the shared content online, as tracked by AddThis, was sent to Facebook. Already it was the biggest sharing platform, no surprise given the size of its audience.

But Facebook grew by one third in 2010 and now accounts for 44 percent of sharing. All other services put together barely make up more than half of the sharing activity.

Among the more significant competition is an old favorite, email, which was actually the second most preferred method, but also younger players like Twitter. Still, email sharing is 38 percent bigger than Twitter.

Also interesting, while Facebook's growth was impressive, other services actually saw even bigger gains.

Sharing via Gmail saw the biggest bump, a 394 percent increase over the previous year. StumbleUpcon was second with a 254 percent rise. Other surprises include Orkut, with a 212 percent increase and Yahoo Mail with 179 percent. Facebook only came in fifth.

Facebook is bound to gain even more in the coming year. The Like button is already popping up all over the web and there's no reason to believe this will not continue in 2011.

And, as new users come in, the activity can only increase. Twitter should probably see a more significant rise in 2011 as well, since the service is still growing, it doubled this year alone.