In a year where China’s getting increasingly on edge about anything that might create a political or social stability manhole just before the Big Sixty, when the PRC turns 60 on October 1, 2009, the Beijing Evening News has done a multi-page special in its Saturday LOHAS edition about — MSN, or now known more “accurately” as Windows Live Messenger.

During the past ten years, a fair number — pardon the pun — of MSN numbers have stacked up. Here’s how MSN has impacted us:

• The average age worldwide for MSN users is 26.5 years.

• An average MSN chat takes 5 minutes; in China, which is somewhat a chattier nation, chats go up to 8 minutes on average.

• On average, people go on MSN as often as they eat — that’s three times a day.

• 28 million trees are saved through MSN chats — if they were printed out, the planet would be a hotter place.

• 30.5 million users are on MSN — and that’s in Brazil alone. That’s 82.4% of the netizenry there — and 11.4% of the whole Internet population. (Figures given in the paper are good through July 2007 — we realize that this thing’s a little “tardy”…)