TheNewMedia Byte - 12/28/11

1.Google gives a jolt to the online travel industry with its new flight search service. Starting December this year, Google place its flight search results as the top-most result when a user searches on flight details in US. Google searches such as 'NY to La' now yield a Google powered interactive chart of the cheapest airfares between the two cities. Google's flight tool links exclusively to airline websites. The travel websites like Orbitz, Expedia and others have not appreciated this move of Google. To read more - click here.


2. ComScore has taken out a detailed report on social networking in 2011. It has very interesting findings to tell us. Social networking sites now reach 82% of the world's Internet population ages 15 and older that accessed the Web from a home or work computer, representing 1.2 billion users around the globe. Israel leads all the countries in the time spent on social networking sites which is 11 hours on an average. The report found that women are more spending more time on social networking sites, with females worldwide spending on average 6.5 hours versus 5 hours for men worldwide. Europe and Latin America were the most social regions, with women spending an average of 8.2 hours in both regions during October of 2011 at social networking sites. Mobile devices were also playing a key role in the growing use of social media. In the U.S. nearly one third (32%) of the total U.S. mobile population ages 13 and older reported accessing a social networking site at least once in October of 2011 via their phone. However, the ad revenue has not kept up with the growing usage of social networking sites as it attracts only 15% of the US dollars for ads.


3. Police in Toronto are having a tough time for checking drunk drivers because many people are using Twitter to leak out the location set for testing. Read the article here.