Smartphone users are becoming increasingly comfortable with using their phones to shop online. According to new data from Compete , about 37% of smartphone users have purchased something with their handset in the last 6 months. Among the most popular items that these users bought are music, books, DVDs, video games and movie tickets. At the same time, though, Compete also found that smartphone users are very likely to abandon shopping sites that haven't been optimized for mobile usage. Almost 8% of smartphone owners who tried to buy something from their phone were simply unable to do so. Sponsor Most Popular Shopping-Related Activities: Price Comparison and Finding Reviews Researching products is still the most popular shopping-related activity on the smartphones. According to Compete's survey, 41% of iPhone users and 43% of Android owners check sale prices while they are shopping. Surely, the popularity of mobile apps like ShopSavvy and RedLaser - which make checking prices as easy as scanning a barcode - will only drive these numbers up in the coming months. The second most popular shopping-related activity for smartphone owners is finding consumer reviews. 39% of all iPhone users and 31% of all Android users use their devices for this. Big-Ticket Items Only 9% of all iPhone users and 11% of all Android users said that they would buy big-ticket items over $500 from their phone. In general, the majority of smartphone owners is most likely to buy lower-priced items under $10. Discuss
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More Smartphone Users Now Use Their Phones to Shop Online
A year ago we profiled an oddly-named service called ://URLFAN , which we concluded was a good 'Influence Index' for the Web. ://URLFAN ranks websites by popularity, based on blog mentions . Unlike analytics services like Alexa or Compete , ://URLFAN doesn't measure website traffic. It's similar to Technorati , only ://URLFAN ranks all websites and not just blogs. We noted in our original review that ://URLFAN's ranking list will inevitably be biased towards users of social media - and in particular bloggers. While this is a relatively small proportion of the world, nevertheless we thought it was still a useful index - because social media users are highly influential . With that in mind, which websites are currently ranked the most influential on the Web? Sponsor ://URLFAN is, as we write this, "currently ranking the popularity of 3,783,534 websites by parsing 302,023,552 blog posts from 5,948,937 blog feeds." The list below is ://URLFAN's all-time top 10. The number in brackets to the right of each item is last year's top 10 ranking (Nov '08). #1. en.wikipedia.org (1) #2. youtube.com (3) #3. flickr.com (2) #4. twitter.com (9) #5. google.com (4) #6. myspace.com (6) #7. facebook.com (-) #8. imdb.com (5) #9. nytimes.com (7) #10. apple.com (8) There is one new entrant, Facebook at #7. washingtonpost.com moved out of the top 10, dropping from #10 last year to #12 this year. Twitter is the biggest mover, up 5 places to #4. Wikipedia is still the most cited website on the Web, for social media users and bloggers. YouTube and Flickr, two oft-used media sharing services, occupy the next two spots. Last year we noted that there were 10 independent blogs in the top 100, including ReadWriteWeb. There are the same number this year, with a couple of new entrants. Here is the blog list circa November '09, again with last year's rank bracketed: #23 techcrunch.com (#25) #26 huffingtonpost.com (#32) #33 engadget.com (#28) #37 boingboing.net (#29) #39 gizmodo (-) #41 mashable.com (#91) #53 arstechnica.com (#50) #60 lifehacker.com (#63) #78 readwriteweb.com (#97) #93 smashing magazine (-) Finally, what's new at ://URLFEED this year? You guessed it, a Real-Time Web feature! The site has introduced a Real-time Buzz Radar , which tracks buzzwords in the blogosphere. 'Chrome OS' is number 5 on the list currently, on the back of Google's Chrome OS event last week. ://URLFAN isn't a perfect measure of influence - you could easily argue that Google's PageRank is far better. However we continue to like the concept and we believe it's an accurate and up-to-date reflection of influential websites on the Web. Discuss
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The Most Influential Websites in the World: Wikipedia #1, Twitter #4 With a Bullet
