According to an infographic released by Mashable and Statista, all 10 of this year's bestselling mobile apps are for social networking.
Vine has been the top seller this year by far, exceeding the other app sales by nearly a factor of four. This social networking video app launched by Twitter allows users to shoot and post six-second videos that loop like GIFs. Users can either shoot six-seconds of a single video or shoot multiple segments that Vine pieces together to fit within the six-second timeframe.
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Demonstrating the importance we place on sharing images, Flickr and Instagram took the second and third spots on the chart. WhatsApp, a messaging app that allows people to exchange text messages between a range of smartphones using cellular data instead of SMS, came in fourth.
Facebook is by far the world's largest social network. According to Digital Marketing Ramblings, Facebook had approximately 1.26 billion users worldwide at the end of September 2013. Facebook's mobile app came in fifth on the list, and its Messenger app came in tenth.
Microsoft's Skype mobile app took sixth place on the top 10 list, followed by YouTube in seventh place. According to social media blogger Jeff Bullas, more video is uploaded to YouTube in one month than the amount of video that NBC, ABC and CBS combined have produced in 60 years. Twitter and Foursquare rounded out the top 10 in the eighth and ninth spots.
Susan Cain, author of Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking, has written, "In an overly extroverted society, everyone craves asynchronous, non-F2F communication."
Based on our taste in apps, "non-F2F" definitely doesn't mean "non-social."
Edited by
Blaise McNamee