A recent report released by comScore has revealed that the United States isn’t into social networking as much you might think. Yes, even though whenever you walk by a coworker’s computer you can spy Facebook opened in a tab, or anytime you go into a heavily populated area, it seems everyone is tweeting or Instagramming or Facebooking on their phone. Though social networking is the most popular online activity in the world, and accounts for 1 in 5 minutes spent online, and reaches 82% of the world’s Internet population, somehow, the U.S. doesn’t care as much as your eyes and these stats would have you believe. Israel cares, though, deeply so, as they are far and away the world’s biggest social networking addicts by a fairly large margin.

Want to know why people are unfriending you on Facebook? Well, it’s not as easy to tell as it was back when everybody was doing it for the Whoppers. Sometimes you just know, but other times the best you can do is venture a guess, and this infographic from NM Incite can help you narrow it down. Most of the time it’s due to offensive comments, or the fact that you were never real friends with people in the first place. But you can also get cut off for updating too frequently or too infrequently. If it makes you feel any better, “physical attractiveness” and “increasing friend count” rank 4 and 5 on the list of reasons to friend people in the first place, so you’re probably better off with fewer friends in that case. Or, at least, that’s a good thing to tell yourself if you need to sleep at night.

Despite reports suggesting that the honeymoon might be over for Google+, an interesting milestone has surfaced regarding the Google-backed social network. Singer Britney Spears has apparently earned the distinction of being the first Google+ user to get one million followers. That’s a helluva lot of circles.

Vigilant readers will recall how this weekend we wrote about a rumor claiming that social networking juggernaut Facebook had purchased the Austin based check-in service Gowalla. Well, now those rumors have been confirmed, and Gowalla’s founder has said that the service will begin shutting down next month.

A recent survey by Jobvite suggests that 16% of Americans (or about 1 in 6) who are looking for another job found their most recent one via social media. That amounts to somewhere around 22 million Americans who found their last job not only online (which isn’t too suprising nowadays) but on an actual social networking site.

You might immediately think “Oh, of course, that’s what LinkedIn is for,” but actually, the majority of these lucky job-finders attribute their employment to Myspace Facebook. 78% percent of them, in fact.

Cell phones have changed college life for sure. I mean, back in the day, people used to actually have hardwired phones in their dorms and stuff. Right? I don’t even know. I’m not that old. In any event, there’s no arguing that among people who are using their phones to the fullest extent possible, college kids are right up there. But what exactly are the using them for? This infographic from HackCollege jumps right into that.

As it turns out, a whopping 94% of college students are texting everyday, 97% of those with smartphones are using them for social networking and 88% regularly text in class. Of course, there are some exceptions to these rules. The one I find the most confusing is that apparently only 75% of college students sleep with their phones next to them. How is that not 100%? Where else would you keep a phone at night? Does anyone actually still use dedicated alarm clocks? I guess so, but I find that pretty hard to believe.

Full infographic after the jump.

Ever since Google+ opened up for public use, had a huge traffic spike, and then dropped back off, the social network has continued to take a backseat to Facebook for most. Google+ does have it’s faithful users however, and Google is in no way throwing in the towel when it comes to updating the network and making it more and more appealing for the people who use it, and the people who might be interested in coming back to revive their idle account.

One of the newest and definitely the most interesting of these improvements is “Ripples.” By viewing a public post’s ripples, you get access to a whole bunch of information that all social networks collect, but generally keep close to their chests. Not only can you see who shared what with who, growing out in a series of concentric circles, but you can also go back and replay the sharing in scaled time, so you can actually watch how something blew up, even if you didn’t catch it until it was already big.

iPhone versus Android: The eternal mobile battle. There are a lot of ways you can come at the competition: Which has the better hardware, which has better customization options, which has the better software and development capabilities, which one has the least annoying fanboys, and one more: Which users have more friends? And that is what this infographic courtesy of Onavo tackles.

Okay, not really who has more friends, but rather, who uses which social apps and how. But that’s totally the same as who has more friends, right? It’s not like anyone ever just uses social networks to self-promote or pester people they don’t really know with details of their life that no one reads or cares about. No, social networking is all about maintaining deep, involved relationships. Definitely. But the iPhone has 27% more Facebook use, so those guys must be more popular.

Today marks the end of an extremely awkward chapter in the life of Google, the overlords of the Internet. Today, Google announced that they are finally killing Google Buzz. The move to end Buzz comes as Google+ enters the field as a real power and as the search giant has begun pruning off many of its side projects.

When it was originally launched, Google Buzz was meant to be the search giant’s first foray into social networking. Its aim was to allow users to quickly and easily share their activity, and place it prominently on the main Gmail page. However, the service was far too overreaching, leading to an uproar that ended with the service becoming a wasteland, and Google in hot water with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission.

For the six of you that still use the service, Google says you’ll be able to pull down a copy of your data using Google Takeout.

Paul Allen, the man who has been tracking the growth of Google+ using name statistics, has posted some interesting new stats on the social network since it became open to the public last week. Since shedding beta status, the site has apparently added 30% to its user base. In terms of individual people, that’s about 10 million new members. Amazingly, most of the growth occurred in the 48 hours since the site opened its doors to any and all interested parties.

As always, Allen’s research is interesting but also far from hard and fast. His system relies on looking at the frequency of names that are, statistically speaking, rare. With that in mind, his numbers are estimates and not a headcount of total users. However, he believes that the fledgling social network is now packing some 43 million total users.  That’s a far cry from the over 800 million Facebook members, but it is a nonetheless impressive jump.

Now if someone could get a count of active users on those networks, we could get some really interesting analysis.

(via Search Engine Land)