• by Jack Loechner , Staff Writer @mp_research, August 30, 2010

According to new research from The Nielsen Company, though Email has long been the king on home computers, it's shifting quickly to social networking and online gaming. Americans spend 36% of their online time communicating and networking across social networks, blogs, personal email and instant messaging, up from15.8% just a year ago (43% increase).

Nielsen analyst, Dave Martin, says "Despite the almost unlimited nature of what you can do on the web, 40% of U.S. online time is spent on just three activities: social networking, playing games and emailing, leaving a whole lot of other sectors fighting for a declining share of the online pie."

Additional findings from Nielsen NetView and Nielsen VideoCensus include these comments:

• Online games overtook personal email to become the second most heavily used activity behind social networks - accounting for 10% of all U.S. Internet time. Email dropped from 11.5% of time to 8.3%.
•  Of the most heavily-used sectors, Videos/Movies (which includes video-specific and movie-related websites only - and is not inclusive of video streaming behavior elsewhere) was the only other to experience a significant growth in share of U.S. activity online. Its share of activity grew relatively by 12% from 3.5 to 3.9%
• June 2010 was a major milestone for U.S. online video as the number of videos streamed passed the 10 billion mark. The average American consumer streaming online video spent 3 hours 15 minutes doing so during the month
• Despite some predictions otherwise, the rise of social networking hasn't pushed email and instant messaging into obscurity just yet. Although both saw double-digit declines in share of time, email remains as the third heaviest activity online (8.3% share of time) while instant messaging is fifth, accounting for four% of Americans online time
• Although the major portals also experienced a double digit decline in share, they remained as the fourth heaviest activity, accounting for 4.4% of U.S. time online

The way U.S. consumers spend their Internet time on their mobile phones paints a slightly different picture to that of Internet use from computers, according to comments from the Intelligence Report by the Online Publishers Association. In the Nielsen survey of mobile web users, there is a double-digit (28%) rise in the prevalence of social networking behavior, but the dominance of email activity on mobile devices continue with an increase from 37.4% to 41.6% of U.S. mobile Internet time.

With 10.5% of mobile Internet users time spent on social networks, they are only the third most popular destination, but they have narrowed the time gap separating social networks from portals by 5.1 percentage points since 2009.

Christina Warren of Mashable concludes that "... email is... still more versatile, but for users that have a heavily populated social graph, sometimes social networking services can offer a more convenient messaging experience."

For more information from Nielsen, please visit here.