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Welcome to "On the Net Today". Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, we bring you a handpicked selection of three valuable and interesting online resources to help you get the most out of the internet and optimize your browsing time.

Here are the three resources we've prepared for today:

• The 36 Questions That Lead to Love

• Trend Hunter: A great trend hunting platform for innovation

• Meltwater offers a comprehensive portrait of the digital world in its 2025 Report

The 36 Questions That Lead to Love

Ten years ago, the The New York Times' column and podcast "Modern Love" published one of its most popular articles in its history. It was titled "To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This," and was written by Mandy Len Catron.

The essay discussed the author's use of a list of 36 questions developed by psychologist Arthur Aron more than 30 years ago. In his laboratory, Aron had proposed a simple experiment, described by the NYT as follows: "A heterosexual man and woman entered the laboratory through separate doors. They sat facing each other and answered a series of increasingly intimate questions. Then they silently looked into each other's eyes for four minutes. Six months later, the two participants got married." 

The New York Times published the list of these 36 questions, available here. Its publication sparked enormous interest among followers of the "Modern Love" column.

This week, in celebration of Valentine's Day, "Modern Love" has published a special episode -commemorating the successful publication from ten years ago- for which they have collected numerous testimonials from people explaining the exact moment they realized they had fallen in love.

The episode also features the narration of the decade-old essay read by its author, Mandy Len Catron, who additionally explains in the final section whether she is still in love with the same man with whom she completed the 36-question questionnaire 10 years ago.

• How to Fall (and Stay) in Love – NYT's "Modern Love" Podcast 

  And an update to the famous Modern Love story "To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This."

Here are several options to listen to this episode: Spotify, YouTube and Apple Podcasts

Happy Valentine's Day!

Links:

• To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This (Jan. 9, 2015)

• The 36 Questions That Lead to Love (Jan. 9, 2015)

• How to Fall (and Stay) in Love – Podcast

Trend Hunter: A great trend hunting platform for innovation

Trend Hunter is an international platform that helps detect and generate new ideas in any business field through the analysis of thousands of trends. As stated by its leaders, Trend Hunter aims to be a "source of inspiration" for professionals, entrepreneurs, and business owners.

The company, which was founded in 2005 by innovation expert Jeremy Gutsche and is headquartered in Toronto (Canada), has a global network of more than 380,000 trend hunters spread around the world, along with a team of dozens of researchers and futurists, and the support of artificial intelligence to analyze trends. After years of publishing articles about trends, Trend Hunter shifted its focus, with the help of AI, towards researching and identifying trends that could be useful for brands and companies interested in innovation.

Every day, Trend Hunter offers new ideas on its website -it has accumulated nearly half a million proposals- and news filtered by topics. The company creates custom reports for companies worldwide, among other professional services. According to the company, Trend Hunter receives 20 million visits per month.

Trend Hunter's search engine allows users to quickly locate trends, resources, tools, and other information about any topic of interest.

Among the trend reports published by Trend Hunter is the annual report, TrendReport 2025, which can be downloaded for free after registration and provides a global overview of the main trends in various fields.

Link:

• Trend Hunter

Meltwater offers a comprehensive portrait of the digital world in its 2025 Report

The media intelligence, social media, and consumer analytics company Meltwater has published its annual "Digital 2025 Global Overview Report", which provides an in-depth analysis of internet user behavior worldwide and offers a wealth of data that can be very useful for marketing professionals and anyone who needs information on this topic.

Here are some of the global data points offered in the report:

• 67.9% of the world's population are internet users. In absolute figures, this is 5.56 billion people, 2.5% more than the previous year.

• There are a total of 5.24 billion social media users (63.9% of the world's population). This is 4.1% more than last year.

• The number of mobile users is 5.78 billion people (70.5% of the total population). This represents a 2% increase compared to the previous year.

In Meltwater's 650-page report, it is possible to find virtually any data related to internet usage. One of the most interesting charts is the one showing the types of websites and apps most used by users. It is headed by messaging (94.5%), followed by social networks (94.4%), search engines (82.3%), email (75%), and shopping, auctions, or classifieds (74.9%).

On the other hand, these are the average times (in hours and minutes) spent by internet users over 16 years of age on the different platforms or media:

• Total internet: 06:38 (6 hours and 38 minutes)

• Internet on mobile: 03:46

• TV (total): 03:13

• Internet on computer or tablet: 02:52

• Social media: 02:21

• TV (traditional): 01:50

• Press (total): 01:40

• Streaming music: 01:25

• Online TV/streaming: 01:24

• Video games: 01:03

• Press (online): 00:58

• Podcasts: 00:52

• Radio: 00:51

• Press (print): 00:42 

 Link:

• 2025 Global Digital Report

What resources would you recommend to include in the newsletter? Feel free to email your proposals to [email protected]. We are confident that your input will help make this project even more valuable.

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That's all for today. Thank you for reading!