14 DAY TRIAL // Facebook’s popularity is already old news, as is the fact that the social networking platform passed the 500 million users milestone within the past few days. It has often been said that Facebook would be the third largest country in the world, assuming the users were its inhabitants. Truth be told, not all 500 million accounts have been created by humans (since bots have become quite a common issue over the Internet) and not all of them are actively used. Nonetheless, half a billion is still a very large figure and it would be interesting to analyze the world distribution of all these people.
The data visualization company Tableau has used the information gathered and published by the UK Guardian data blog and created interactive maps displaying the location of Facebook users.
The most obvious thing to notice when exploring the maps is the fact that the social network is not equally popular over the world – predictably, Europe and the Americas have the highest market penetrations, whereas Africa and Asia (with some exceptions) have not been too ‘impressed’ by the Facebook trend… yet, at least.
To be more specific, there are several countries where Facebook adoption is over 40 percent, and the first one is, surprisingly enough, Hong Kong, where 48.51 percent of the population apparently has a Facebook account. Other countries where a lot of inhabitants are social networking fans are Canada (45.48 percent), United Kingdom (42.78 percent), United States (40.72 percent), Chile (40.7 percent), Sweden (40.62 percent) and Australia (40.52 percent).
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As previously mentioned, the figures listed for Africa and Asia are not at all high, partly because of the restricted Internet access, partly because there is not data available. As a matter of fact, only a third of the countries in the world are accounted for, therefore the information should be used only as a guideline, rather than for statistical purposes.
All in all, Facebook does have 500 million registered accounts, regardless of the nationality of its users, and this number will surely grow considering it will gradually gain popularity in new markets, especially after its dedicated movie, The Social Network, will hit theaters in October 2010.