Facebook’s iPhone App Can Double Your Data Costs : Twitter’s Cheep-Cheaper
Nearly half of those who visit social media sites do so from their phones, and 40 percent of mobile users have at least one social networking app installed. It almost goes without saying that Facebook is the single most popular free app on both Android and iOS, which is no small feat.
These statistics reflect the tremendous scale and velocity of social media, as well as the heavy toll this mega-phenomenon is taking on our lives. Grabi.org summarized some of the ways in which Facebook and Twitter impact their users in a set of infographics that define this trend in terms of broadband data, cost and time.
iPhone apps to curb data usage
According to Grabi, new features increase bandwidth consumption much faster than new members. Mobile Facebook users consume 50 percent more bandwidth than they did before the client launched in November 2012, but the social network’s userbase grew by only 4 percent since. A sizable portion of this new traffic is accounted for by external sites: a quarter goes to YouTube and 16.5 percent is generated by Twitter.
Browsing Facebook for one hour, uploading a photo and viewing 10 every day for a year will set you back by about $470. Twitter users have easier: uploading 1 photo a day and viewing 10 every 23 hours would only amount to $125 per year.
3 Ways to Cut iPhone Data Usage + Avoid Overages
The cost of data will drop to a mere $0.01 per megabyte in 2015, but social networks are not getting any less addictive. Using a smartphone for social network slows down drivers’ response times by 38 percent, more than cannabis and alcohol combined, and it makes them 400 percent more likely to crash.
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