Its absolutely official. Like it, or loathe it, 2009 is the year of Social Media. Once upon a time, not so long ago, Twitter was a place where you could read about what someone ate for dinner. Now, in certain instances, its the first place to go for breaking news. Sites like Digg and Facebook now both have an incredible impact in terms of the real world. Peoples lives are changed and important questions have been asked and answered. Benchmarks have been breached and milestones have been obliterated as the social media bandwagon shows unrelenting growth. You just need to look at the metrics to see that this is more than just a fad.

In March, YouTube reached 100 million monthly viewers in the US. 6.3 billion videos were viewed on the site. Its competitor, Hulu, is also growing fast, but not nearly as fast as YouTube. In March alone, YouTube has grown almost two Hulus in size. According to some calculations, YouTube will serve 75 billion video streams to 375 million unique visitors in 2009.

Is Google getting any money out of it? Hardly. Some reports claim that the video sharing service is costing them $1.65 million dollars per day. Is this money-bleeding causing Google much grief? Not really. According to their latest financial report, its revenue in the first quarter was $5.51 billion, a 3% decrease from last quarter, but still a 6% increase from the same period last year.

Facebook has grown from 100 million to 200 million users in less than 8 months. If it were a country, it would be bigger than Brazil. Its traffic has grown immensely in one year's period, especially in Europe where it grew 314%. According to comScore, it has grown a staggering 2,721% in Italy from February 2008 to February 2009. In other European countries, its growth was also immense: 999% in Spain, 607% in Belgium, 518% in France, 499% in Switzerland. Here's another sign of the times: Nielsen Online's latest research shows that social networking is now more popular than email. According to their study, 66.8% of Internet users have used social networks, while only 65.1% have used email.

Remember the time when Robert Scoble had a couple thousand Twitter followers, and it was a big deal? Now there's a guy with one million Twitter followers. If you type "Ashton Kutcher" into Google, his Twitter account will be the third result. Twitter itself is growing at a crazy rate; although it already has a very large audience, it grew 76.8 percent just from February to March. Its yearly growth rate? 1,382 percent. According to Nielsen, Twitter currently has 7 million unique monthly visitors. If it keeps growing at this rate, it'll have nearly 100 million visitors same time next year.

Finally, the most recent numbers I've had the misfortune to read about: The Pirate Bay four has been sentenced to 1 year of prison each, and they must pay 3.6 million dollars in damages.