Facebook beats Google in Time Spent:

How much time do people waste on Facebook? Apparently 41 million minutes per month.

Americans spent 685,000 hours (or 41.1 million minutes) on Facebook in August according to a report from comScore. On Google’s various sites, they spent 39.8 million minutes, while Yahoo came in third with 37.7 million minutes.

“Facebook continues to grow its user base and grow engagement among its users,” said Andrew Lipsman, senior director of industry analysis at comScore. “A year ago Facebook accounted for less than 5% of overall time spent online in the U.S. and today it accounts for 10%. … This continued growth presents more opportunity for advertising now, and also more potential to engage its network for new revenue possibilities in the future.”

Facebook’s top-ranking position comes a month after the social networking site reached 500 million users.

In March, Facebook hit another milestone when the site replaced Google as the most visited website in the U.S. for a full week.

The Facebook vs. Google battle heated up even more in August, with the launch of Facebook Places. Will Google Instant actually reduce the amount of time people spend searching? We’ll see how it goes.

It will be interesting to see what these two giants come up with next.