14 DAY TRIAL // Facebook is an established player in much of the world, at least in the developed world. It's not gaining too many new users in the US or in the UK for the very simple reason that there aren't that many people not using Facebook left.
That's a different story in many places around the world, while 2011 was a year of consolidation in Facebook's established markets, the social network doubled or even tripled its size in some other places.
And this doesn't mean going from 100,000 users to 300,000, it's going from 9 million users to 35 million, like it did in Brazil.
Researcher Nick Burcher compiled a list of the biggest countries on Facebook, based on data from the site itself. Countries are ranked by the number of people using the site.
Naturally, the US comes first with 157 million users at the end of 2011. But it only added less than 12 million new users in the previous year, an eight percent growth.
The second biggest country though, Indonesia, added 30 percent more people, ending up with 41 million users, up from 32 million. But that pales in comparison to India which went from 17 million users to 41 million in just one year, an almost 140 percent growth.
Brazil's growth in 2011 is the most impressive though, both because of the percentage, it grew three times as large, but also because of the large number of users, 35 million at the end of the year, up from just 8.8 million at the end of 2010.
What's even more interesting is that India and Brazil used to be Orkut's last remaining holdouts, the places where Google's old and neglected social network was still king.
As the numbers show, things are changing. Google+ has been gaining a lot of popularity, in India in particular, but it clearly has a very long way to go before even being comparable to Facebook.