Social Networking driving the growth in Mobile Browsing

Opera Mini cumulative users per month

Social networking now accounts for almost 40 percent of worldwide mobile web traffic, topping the 60 percent mark in some countries including the U.S., South Africa and Indonesia, according to browser development firm Opera Software's first "State of the Mobile Web" report.

Based on the aggregate, anonymous traffic patterns of more than 44 million cumulative Opera Mini users worldwide, Opera reports that full web surfing represents close to 78 percent of all traffic, far outpacing content on WAP and .mobi sites--in the U.S. market, MySpace is the most visited mobile web destination, followed in descending order by Google, mobile social networking service MocoSpace, Yahoo and Facebook. Among the top 100 sites visited by all Opera Mini users, almost a quarter of all traffic directs to content portals or search engines.

I love Opera Mini, its free and great user experience for my Nokia N95 & N82 and I spent a great deal of time browsing on it especially accessing my mobile email and updating my Facebook.

For more on the report of Opera, you can view the report here.