OSLO, NORWAY: Facebook and vKontakte are the most visited social networks for Opera Mini users according to Opera's State of the Mobile Web, published today. Unique Opera Mini users of Facebook grew more than 693 percent in 2008. Owing to the popularity of Opera Mini in Russian-speaking countries, vKontakte is the most popular social network. Usage of the site grew almost 910 percent in 2008.

The full report is available from www.opera.com/smw/.
 
* Opera Mini users viewed more than than 6.4 billion pages in December. Since November, page views have gone up 13 percent.
* Opera Mini users generated more than 93.8 million MB of data for operators worldwide. Since November, the data consumed went up by 13.2 percent. * Data in Opera Mini is compressed 90 percent on average. If this data were uncompressed, Opera Mini users would have viewed over 938 million MB of data in December.
 
In November, during a regular verification of our Opera Mini statistics, we discovered a technical issue concerning the counting of unique users. We have corrected this issue for our December numbers. Historic figures prior to October 2008 are estimates. We will update the charts as we correct the data set. This affects the total number of unique users, although estimated growth rates, page views, data transfers are accurate. Indeed, page views have increased to almost 360 pages per user per month.
 
Report findings
 Opera's first State of the Mobile Web examined social networks. In this month's report, Opera returns to review the top social networks in key countries.
 
Globally the top 10 social networks for Opera Mini users are (ranked by unique users):
 
vkontakte.ru - 909.17 percent growth in 2008
facebook.com - 693.11 percent growth in 2008
friendster.com - 670.13 percent growth in 2008
orkut.com - 296.78 percent growth in 2008
odnoklassniki.ru - 545.40 percent growth in 2008
peperonity.com - 396.65 percent growth in 2008
hi5.com - 372.60 percent growth in 2008
myspace.com - 618.42 percent growth in 2008
mamba.ru - 1055.51 percent growth in 2008
mocospace.com - 834.89 percent growth in 2008

In the United States, Facebook edged out MySpace thanks to an impressive growth rate during the year, with unique users growing 1632 percent, while MySpace user growth was almost 52 percent.
 
Facebook continued its impressive performance in English-speaking countries. In the United Kingdom, Facebook gained 536 percent to become the most visited social network for Opera Mini users. South Africa also had Facebook as its top social network. Outside of the anglophone world, Facebook had impressive performance in Egypt as usage jumped more than  3400 percent.
 
All was not lost for MySpace, however. In Germany, MySpace was the strongest of all the social networks, growing 492 percent in 2008.
 
Just as on the wired Web, Orkut was the most popular in India and Brazil, while Nasza-klasa was the most popular in Poland. This further underscores Opera's belief that there is only One Web, which is accessed through a variety of devices.

"Social networks are helping drive sustained growth of One Web," said Jon von Tetzchner, CEO, Opera. "Despite prevailing economic conditions, we expect the use of the Web through mobile devices will continue to grow in 2009. More people want access to the Web on a global scale. With extra capacity in both developed and developing nations, we expect to see more people come online using a mobile phone than any other device."