During the second and third quarters of 2008, around 7.3 million Britons accessed the web via mobile phones. Generally this represents an increase of around 25% compared to just 3% for the PC metric. When you compare the two figures, mobile internet is growing around eight times as fast as traditional internet usage.

Non-surprisingly Google is the most popular site, but having only been visited by 23% of users during the period it seems that users are using an alternative form of search or possible not even searching at all. BBC is the most popular website with hits from 21% of users and Facebook follows close behind having been visited by 20% of users.

The majority of the sites visited were information sites such as news, sports, weather and e-mail, showing the medium has mainly been used for information on the move and may not yet be the e-commerce fantasy everyone is hoping for. The majority of sites are also large brand names that have direct visits as opposed to using a search tool, which cuts out a lot of smaller businesses who may have been able to compete through search rankings.

Even though the focus of mobile internet is on news and may not yet provide significant market-growth for many businesses, the figures do show that mobile internet is becoming more popular and businesses should incorporate mobile search into future marketing plans.

The first Android-powered phone, the T-Mobile G1, is designed for use on the internet and comes with a touch screen, a QWERTY keyboard and a trackball giving the user multiple ways to interact with the phone. This handset is due to be available within the next few days.

Comparisons to the iPhone are rife, especially with the touch screen, but the G1 offers extras such as being able to press on links or run multiple tasks at once. However, it’s the Android software – which includes Google Mail, Google Maps, GPS as well as the operating system – that is getting most people excited.

Google’s Larry Page said: “This is as good a computer as you had a few years ago in this phone. When you think about that in terms of access to the internet, being able to really use the web… that’s a tremendous opportunity.”

Like any fan video, it wouldn’t be complete without criticisms of the main rivals whilst also praising many of its advantages. Whilst it’s always entertaining to see fans come up with songs like this, I’m a bit worried about the next time a company thinks they can sneak a song – or an advertisement – out in this way. Still, history shows they don’t always get too far before being detected.

This is backed up by recent research that discovered that 40% of the time people spend on line is used to keep up with 20 domains.

It’ll come as no surprise that Facebook, Digg, MySpace and YouTube are a few of the most highly visited sites but the men who were being the research were shocked by how little of the internet was explored by the average user. Comparisons were made to village life – although we may have hundreds of ‘friends’ on social networking sites, we actually only keep in touch regularly with a few of those.

One of the senior fellows, Bernardo Huberman, said: “Things are starting to become intimate again. We went through this explosion, this illusion that the world is at my fingertips and I can reach anyone and everybody. But at the end of the day we notice that we actually interact with very few.”

Attention is scarce online – when once you could charge for certain information (for example, when someone was trying to organise a holiday) now that is easily accessible on the internet.

The main findings were that novelty was a key factor in the popularity of a site and another was popularity – meaning that everyone joined Facebook simply because everyone was joining Facebook.

Huberman hailed the work of Paris Hilton for being able to keep in the headlines, saying: “If I were to do something idiotic like stand on my head now on this table perhaps some of you might write about it. If I keep doing that every hour of every day of the week, most likely you won’t do it. So I have to invent new things to be on the news the way Paris Hilton is. That’s a huge talent in a sense.”

Things Paris has been in the headlines for: defending the Jonas brothers, announcing that she wants to duet with Britney Spears, getting a film about her cut down to one showing at the Toronto International Film Festival, the latest in her prison saga and for wearing a tree hugger T-shirt. Not bad for one day!

You’d think at that length the updates would be perfect to send to a phone – there’s even a little room to add a small advertising message – and for a long time Twitter agreed with you. However, they’ve now changed their mind and will no longer be sending texts to anyone who doesn’t live in the US, Canada or India.

The website claims that the financial burden of the service was too much – saying that they would have to pay $1000 per user because of rising costs from mobile operators – but they will continue to negotiate in an attempt to bring it back at some stage.

Other mobile services are still available – you can still update your Twitter status by phone – and users with new-gen, hi-tech phones will have no problem updating their pages, but people with old, non-WAP enabled handsets are going to struggle. Some of these people are already thinking of deserting the site and already have new pastures in their mind, such is their dismay at the loss of the service. Of course, not everyone used the service and some people are struggling to see what all the fuss is about, even suggesting that the idea of sending out free texts was doomed from the start.

Twitter themselves remain optimistic. They say that over the coming weeks and months they will be bringing local numbers to a few countries across Europe – rather than just the one UK number they previously had – making Twittering even more accessible for European users.

As reported by Brand Republic the service will allow users to access all of their social networking sites from one interface by displaying the most popular functions of each site in one place. This means that people wanting to make quick updates will not need to log into each site individually to make the changes they want.

Mike Butcher of Techcrunch notes that the popularity of these types of services and all the mobile apps that are coming out lately will largely depend on the technology in users’ hands. If the user experience is less than stellar then the use of mobiles for accessing social networks as well as using browsers, then the mobile movement may not move anywhere – at least until the technology catches up with the ideas.

But these ideas are not supported by the evidence noted of usage of mobiles to upload content to social networks. In the US a whopping 32% of MySpace users upload content taken on a mobile phone. It’s clear that there is already a connection between sharing content such as photos, ringtones, and more on mobiles.

Soon, you wont even need your computer to do it.