Hasta La Gadget!

Hold on to your seats, stat lovers, 2010 is about to hit you with the full force of its quantifiable web exploits. Web monitoring site Pingdom reports that last year we all sent 107 trillion emails to our loved and unloved ones, which breaks down to 294 billion per day, though only 10.9 percent of those weren’t spam. There are now 1.88 billion email users around the globe and when they’re not too busy communicating, they’re surfing one of the net’s 255 million total sites (21.4 million of which are said to have arrived in 2010). The compendium of numerical knowledge wraps up with a look at social media, where Twitter still has a way to go before catching up with email — there were only 25 billion tweets last year — but continues to grow like mad, having added 100 million users during the year. Facebook added even more, 250 million users, and its thriving population is sharing 30 billion pieces of content (links, pics, video, etc.) each and every month. This isn’t madness, this is the internet.

World sends 107 trillion emails in 2010, most of them about enlarging your stock portfolio originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 15 Jan 2011 11:28:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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How much did it cost for Facebook to acquire the pithy fb.com URL? A cool $8.5 million. But don’t worry, that money went to a good cause–the American Farm Bureau. With a few extra million in its budget, the Farm Bureau moved over to fb.org–all said, probably a more appropriate for a nonprofit aimed at protecting the interests of American farmers.

We could probably think up a few more inappropriate organizations that might want use of those five letters…

Zuckerberg announced the purchase back in November, but didn’t release any financial information. It was the Farm Bureau that let slip the price tag during an annual meeting. The company is “barred from identifying the buyer,” but well, TechCrunch put two and two together.

The site also picked out this choice quote, “At their annual meeting in Atlanta, Farm Bureau officials on Tuesday said the organization earned $8.5 million by selling a couple of domain names but is barred from identifying the buyer.”

While the rest of the country was fixated on politically motivated shooting, bad weather, and the Consumer Electronics Show, its seems that a chunk of the Internet was reeling from the terrible news that Facebook would be shutting down, mid-March. Sure the site just received $500 million dollars, has been valued at billions upon billions, and was the subject of a recent critically acclaimed major motion–but hey, the great one always quit at the top of their game, right?

News that the wildly successful social network was closing up shop was originally reported by The Weekly World News–that home of Batboy notorious for making the The National Enquirer look like The New York Times. But while the WNN has never been taken particularly seriously, this report really has the Internet to thank, having quickly ballooned and taken on a life of its own, as things on the Internet are wont to do.

“After March 15th the whole website shuts down,” a fake Facebook exec fakely told the realish Weekly World News. “So if you ever want to see your pictures again, I recommend you take them off the internet. You won’t be able to get them back once Facebook goes out of business.”

PCMag has taken the whole thing as a sort of cautionary tale against such eventualities.

I know, you’ve always wanted to watch the opening day of Congress, but you just didn’t want to pull yourself away from Facebook. What a predicament. Well, now you can do both.

Yesterday, John Boehner, the incoming House Speaker, announced that beginning at noon on Wednesday (today), you will be able to view a live-stream of the first day of Congress’ new session on Facebook. This is the first time that Congress will be broadcast on the social media site. Facebook users can view the first day’s floor proceedings and Boehner’s first speech as Speaker of the House, and they can make comments as the events happen.

If you want to see Congress make the transition to the GOP-controlled House, go to the “Pledge to America” Facebook page at noon today.

In the tech world, “bigger than Google” is pretty much akin to “bigger than Jesus,” right? The former is certainly something that Mark Zuckerberg can claim in 2010. For the first time, ever, according to traffic analyst firm Hitwise, Facebook was the most visited site in the US, beating out perennial favorite, Google.

According to the firm, the social network comprised a staggering 8.93 percent of all US Web visits this year (between the months of January and November, when the survey was conducted). Google, now at number two, nabbed 7.19 percent of all visits.

Yahoo still managed to get some high marks, grabbing the numbers three and four spots with mail.yahoo.com and plain old Yahoo.com. And all of that advertising money has clearly paid off for Microsoft–Bing made an appearance in the top ten, coming in at number 10.