A new survey by Anderson Analytics lists the Web sites that are most popular among college students. YouTube is the third-most visited site this year, Facebook is in second place and MySpace has moved from fourth to first place since last year’s survey.

Tom Anderson, managing partner of Anderson Analytics, is surprised by the results: “We had anticipated facebook.com might be number one, but myspace.com moved up considerably,” he said.

Some 1000 college students from across the USA were asked what sites they enjoyed and visited the most. Collegehumor.com and Google were the other most-visited two sites in the top five.

So the five most popular sites among college students have little to do with education. Still there is no reason to worry about the future of academia, at least not on account of this. Students have new ways to learn and, online networking and informal learning are very important parts of their learning strategies.

This is why the top three sites in the survey are all typical Web 2.0 sites, emphasizing interaction and exchange of content.

It is no longer possible to separate the social interaction of students from their academic activities. This is interesting information both regarding the future of academia and the evolution of the Web.