The update of Facebook's official statistics page highlights how the social network is expanding its reach via initiatives like Facebook Connect, Open Graph and social plug-ins such as the Like button.
The new topline stats show Facebook has more than 500 million active users, half of whom are logged on to the site at any given time. People spend over 700 billion minutes a month on Facebook, and the average user has 130 friends. The site has more than 200 million active mobile users, and those users are twice as active as Facebook members on the desktop.
Facebook's efforts to grow through integration with third-party sites, however, is where the company is seeing the fastest growth. It now has more than 250 million users engaging with the site through Connect, the Like button and other social plug-ins. That's up from 150 million in late June and 60 million in February, according to Inside Facebook.
"Connect has been around for years, but Facebook's renewed efforts to build on it with the plug-ins and Graph API has quickly paid off. With its big and growing portions of off-site users, Facebook has the opportunity to integrate even more of its features, like Credits and ads, with everywhere users are," noted Eric Eldon in a Friday post.
Since the launch of the plug-ins and Graph API in April, an average of 10,000 sites a day have been integrating with Facebook. Some 2 million sites use the plug-ins, up from 1 million in June. That total includes 80 of comScore's top 100 U.S. sites and more than half of the top global 100.
Facebook also revealed that its users install 20 million applications a day. In terms of interaction on the site, the average user is connected to 80 community pages, groups and events and creates 90 pieces of content a month.
Facebook has continued to extend its push across the Web through more recent projects such as its partnership with Microsoft to create Bing Social. It allows users to view "Likes" and content on Bing generated by Facebook friends. But the move into social search and Facebook's overall effort to make the Web social carry parallel privacy concerns.
The social plug-ins, for instance, collect data such as the Web page visited and Internet address of the visitor as soon as the page loads even if someone doesn't click the Like button and whether a Facebook users is logged in or not. Facebook has said it doesn't correlate pages viewed with advertising, so someone reading articles about vacationing in Mexico won't see ads for hotels in Cancun.
If someone does click on the Like button, however, that data is added to their profile and they might see a related ad. Facebook has also come under criticism for its instant personalizationprogram that shares information about Facebook members with outside sites, including Yelp, Pandora and RottenTomatoes, by default.
COMMENTARY: Orkut was No 1 in India and Brazil at the beginning of the 2010. Facebook just took over No 1 in India with 20 million members compared to India's 19 million. I am surprised that Orkut is still No 1 in Brazil. Orkut owes its market leadership to loyal Brazilian following. In August 2010, Orkut had about 30 million members compared to Facebook's 6 million, but Facebook is gaining in popularity and could hit 10 million members by early 2011 according to some estimates.
Both Facebook and Twitter are banned in China. On November 4, 2010, I reported in a blog post that QZone is China's No 1 social network with an estimated 90 million users.
V Kontakne, which is owned by Blue Sky Technologies (Major Facebook investor), dominates in Russia by a huge margin 75 million members to less than 2 million for Facebook. The key reason is that V Kontakne allows uploading pirated video's and films, which are not permitted on Facebook (and YouTube). Cool.
Gree and Mixi are Japan's No 1 and No 2 social networks, with 21.25 million and 21.02 million members respectively. Facebook is a distant third with only 1.33 million members as of July 2010.
For political reasons, Velayatmadaran is Iran's state run social network, and neither Facebook or Twitter have a real presence there.
According to CheckFacebook.com, which provides Facebook membership by country, Facebook currently has 573 million members.
Courtesy of an article dated December 10, 2010 appearing in MediaPost Publications Online Media Daily
Comments