A whole lotta sharin' going on

An article on mashable.com, a social media news site, published an infographic created by AddThis, a sharing application that is installed on more than 7 million domains and used by more than one billion users per month, with some figures about recent user sharing habits.

Sharing takes place when a user clicks "Share This" within an article or other item on a Web page and can then share the content through his or her own various social media profiles, such as Twitter, Facebook or e-mail. Notably, Gmail outpaced StumbleUpon, Facebook and Twitter, increasing by 395 percent. Facebook sharing increased by 44 percent in 2010, up 33 percent from 2009.

This figure does not include shares done via the Facebook "Like" button, which means the actual percentage of shares through Facebook could be higher. Shares through MySpace dropped 20 percent and Friendster saw a 31 percent drop.