Back in July, we reported that Facebook had become the Internet’s ultimate time waster, with users spending an average of 4 hours, 39 minutes on it per month, more than any other site on the Web.

Since then, however, that number has only gone up. According to numbers from Nielsen Online, users spent an average of 5 hours, 46 minutes on Facebook in the month of August. To put that in perspective, that’s triple the amount of time they spent on Google!

In fact, the next closest site in Nielsen’s top 10 is Yahoo, which, despite still having huge traffic in time consuming areas like news, sports, and financial data, could only get users to stick around for 3 hours and 14 minutes on average during the month. YouTube, surprisingly, only occupied 1 hour and 17 minutes of the average user’s time.

Of course, one of Google’s stated philosophies is that they “may be the only people in the world who can say our goal is to have people leave our homepage as quickly as possible.” However, that ethos was set in stone long before users started spending an inordinate amount of time on social sites – sites that now want to compete in search.

For now, Google’s answer seems to be extending its reach in search through other products – primarily its Chrome web browser and upcoming OS. But not having a strong presence in social networking remains the company’s Achilles’ heel, becoming ever more apparent as Facebook pulls away from the pack in usage stats.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, hidesy

Tags: facebook, Google, stats