14 DAY TRIAL // Opera has come out with its latest State of the Mobile Web report, which it publishes monthly, reveling some, in a way, surprising results. Facebook has now become the most popular social network on the mobile web overtaking the Russian VKontakte for the first time. This is surprising in at least two ways, either because Facebook managed to overtake its seemingly archenemy or because you're wondering why on Earth VKontakte would be the number one social network anyway.
The last bit has to do with the way Opera collects the results but more on that in a bit. The report says Facebook mobile use rose 600 percent in 2009, not bad at all but, then again, Facebook grew on the whole by more than 200 percent last year. This was enough to put the social network in the top spot ahead of the Russian competitor.
The other social media rising star, Twitter, also saw some tremendous growth in 2009 with 28 times more people visiting the site than in the previous year. Twitter was actually the biggest growing social site in the mobile space. As for the mobile browser itself, Opera Mini grew 159 percent in December 2009 with 46.3 million people now using it. In total, Opera handled 20.7 billion web pages in December.
Data coming from Opera on the mobile front has some unique advantages and disadvantages. The latter explain the rather surprising ranking in the social networking as Opera relies on its user base for the data and because Opera Mini is more popular in Russian-speaking countries. Specifically, ranked by usage, Opera Mini is more popular in Russia, Indonesia, India, Ukraine, China, South Africa, United States, Vietnam, Nigeria, and United Kingdom.
Despite this, the data it collects is extremely accurate as all the traffic passes through Opera's sever farms where it gets compressed and then sent out to the mobile browser to save up on bandwidth. "Opera Mini users generated over 315 million megabytes (MB) of data for operators worldwide in December 2009. Since November, the data consumed went up by 10.5%. Data in Opera Mini is compressed up to 90%. If this data were uncompressed, Opera Mini users would have viewed over 2.9 petabytes (PB) of data in December. Since December 2008, data traffic is up 206%," Opera revealed.