US surfers prefer online gaming and socializing to e-mail

SAN FRANCISCO - The Twitter generation doesn’t have much time for e-mail. According to a survey released Monday by ratings firm Nielsen, internet users in the US spend more time using social networks and playing online games than they do on e-mail.

The survey found that use of online networks accounted for 23 percent of time spent on the internet, while online gaming took up 10 percent of internet time.

E-mail, which had been the second most popular online activity in a survey conducted last summer, dropped from 11.5 percent to 8.3 percent of time spent online. In the same period the use of social networks saw a 43 percent uptick, from 15.8 percent to 22.7 percent.

“Despite the almost unlimited nature of what you can do on the Web, 40 percent of US online time is spent on just three activities - social networking, playing games and e-mailing - leaving a whole lot of other sectors fighting for a declining share of the online pie,” said Nielsen analyst Dave Martin in a statement.

E-mail still enjoyed an advantage when it came to the mobile web, where the large installed base of Blackberry devices and the relatively high cost of internet use skews the data away from younger users.

According to Nielsen, e-mail was the dominant activity among mobile web users accounting for 41.6 percent of mobile internet time, up from 37.4 percent last year, while social networking had just 10.5 percent, up from 8.3 percent last year.