Just how fast is the social web growing this second?  This hour?  In addition to that growth; what is the activity like for these platforms?  Are we contributing Weeky?  Hourly? Is this the “year” of social media, or will next year surpass this one?   I recently stumbled upon this interesting little widget created by Gary Hayes at www.personalizedmedia.com.  Although this is still in constant development; the flash app shows just how quickly the social media web is growing.  Gary created this app out of research via social media sources and sites last fall.  He created and coded the app based on his collected data.
A few of the main points Gary sites in using to create his ticker:

• 900 000 blogs posts put up every day (source Technorati State of the Blogosphere 2008)
• Twitter 18 million new users per year & 4 million tweets sent daily (source TechCrunch Apr 09)
• 20 hours of video uploaded every minute onto YouTube (source YouTube blog Aug 09)
• Facebook 600,000 new members each day, 700 million photos, and 4 million videos  (source Inside Facebook Feb 09)
• 96 million videos watched daily on You (source Comscore Jul 06 !)
• Money - $5.5 billion on virtual goods (casual & game worlds) even Facebooks gifts make $70 million annually (source Viximo Aug 09)
• Flickr has 73 million visitors a month who upload 700 million photos (source Yahoo Mar 09)
• 1,250 text messages per second (source Linden Lab release Sep 09)
• SMS - Over 2.3 trillion messages will be sent across major markets worldwide in 2008 (source Everysingleoneofus sms statistics)

Keeping in mind this chart is not in real-time, it does however provide a few interesting nods to social media progression; over $190,000 is spent each DAY on Facebook gifts,  iphone apps are being downloaded at a faster rate than new blog posts,  and Flickr image uploads surpasses Facebook video uploads daily by nearly 123%.  It would be interesting to see Gary add some additional e-mail statistics; e-mail accounts to date, etc.  Seeing social media grow through these numbers is remarkable. I’m off to hit “publish” and contribute my 1/900,000 of the blogposts posted today!