The Online Life

The latest Nielsen study shows that Americans now spend a third of their on-line time surfing blogs, social networks, and playing games...and that's up from 25% just last year.

Perhaps you think you’re doing something useful when you boot up your PC and head online. Odds are, there’s a one-in-three chance you’re spending your time on Facebook. Or playing with virtual sheep.

So says Nielsen in a new report about what American do online. Title: “What Americans Do Online.”

The key takeaway here is that social networks and online games take up about a third of our Web time. That’s up from last year, when the two categories combined to take up about 25 percent of our time.

And that’s good news for Facebook and Farmville-maker Zynga, which dominate the two categories. It’s neutral news for Google (GOOG), since search’s share has stayed consistent at about 3.5 percent, and it’s bad news for Yahoo (YHOO) and AOL (AOL), since portal time has decreased by 19 percent.

That's actually a significant jump, and companies like Facebook know it.  Even the time we spend checking e-mail online is now down to just five minutes out of every hour, and instant messaging is down to half that of email.

Apparently we really are all busy playing Farmville.