ON SOME FUN WITH FACEBOOK NUMBERS

DIGGING IN

I've said this before and I'll say it again. 

One of the very few things I don't like about Facebook is how it limits me to just one geographical network.  Of course, one can add as many educational and corporate networks as one belongs to (authenticated by valid e-mail addresses at those institutions), but you can only join one geographical network.  You can switch from one geo-network to another only once every 90 days.

For most people this likely means the geographical location where they live and work.  It's frustrating for people like me, who have personal and business interests in more than one geographical area (Silicon Valley, New York, and LA/Orange County as starters).

But my personal preferences aside, what this means is that for now, the Facebook page that lists all it's geographical and institutional networks, both in the U.S. and abroad, are interesting proxies for where their 25 million or so registered users hail from.

So I decided to poke around some of these locations and see what interesting tidbits might come up.  Note that these network membership numbers are as of noon EST on June 23, 2007.  Places with members above 2000 have been rounded out for reader convenience.

As you'd expect, the big U.S. cities have some of the biggest member numbers. 

In Facebook's home state, San Francisco has 63,000, and Los Angeles trumps that with it's 134,000.  Orange County isn't shabby with its almost 50,000 members.

Going back to Northern California, Silicon Valley, the home base for Facebook itself, comes in at around 35,000, which seems a tad  lower than what one might expect.

Focusing on the biggest U.S. cities, Miami comes it a touch above the Valley at around 40,000, with both Chicago and New York going head to head with 230,000 and 250,000 respectively.

Surprisingly, the biggest U.S. city is TROUNCED by London, U.K., with over 630,000 members.

Going farther afield, I was surprised to see that Facebook had more members in Iran (1161) vs. Iraq (766), with Afghanistan (461) bringing up the rear.

One of course has to adjust those numbers for members of U.S./Coalition armed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, so the actual native nationals from those countries may be far less than what Iran fields by itself without too many Americans there.

India and Pakistan battle it out with 49,000 members to Pakistan's 16,000 or so.

China surprisingly or not, fields only 21,000 Facebook members out with it's billion plus souls.  Not sure if there's a Chinese language version of Facebook yet.  These may be more the expatriates living in China.

Staying in Asia, Japan also has a surprisingly low number with 18,000 numbers, especially given the high broadband penetration there.

South Korea as well, with it's world-leading broadband penetration, comes in with around 9,900 members.  North Korea manages a 122 members.

Going back to central Asia, Borat's Kazakhstan comes in with a not so shabby 1,500 members.

Abuja, the capital city of Nigeria (4972), which is top of the Facebook overseas list alphabetically, fields 415 members.  Curiously, it's the only city singled out on the Facebook list of countries.  Not sure why exactly.

Particularly surprising for me was that Brazil, in South America, comes in at only 9,000 members.  Guess Google's Orkut network has a near-monopoly of that country's online social net-workers.

And while we're down south, we can't leave out Antarctica, with it's 525 brave souls.

I'll stop there for now, but you get the idea.  There's a treasure trove of interesting data in where all the world's Facebookers come from.

Check it out yourself to see what other factoids you can unearth.

For instance, one can next start to figure out which of these networks are being pro-actively more active amongst themselves with discussion groups, local groups and the like.

San Francisco for example, has a couple of interesting group discussion threads on things residents most hate about the Bay area, and on the best restaurants in town. 

It shouldn't be long before third-party application developers figure out a way to tap into and serve out this local data to Facebook users, in a more user-friendly, malleable form.  Some of these future apps could even be interesting businesses.

Here's an starter application idea for Facebook developers.  How about an app that allows anyone to tap into the Facebook networks data, and sort it into lists that can be monitored in real-time on their web pages, blogs, or what not. 

This data wonk for one would sign up for that app in a hurry.

Comments

[Rong Ou]

I hope you didn't do this manually, because there is this:

http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?api_key=c65e0bd69bc35e4ca29ca1fcce1b80c1

[Mike D]

One number that really jumps out for me is Toronto with 662K FB members - about 6 times what the combined San Francisco / Silicon Valley area has.

[defZA]

South Africa coming in at over 110,000; quite a bit considering the stats you show here.
And Lots of people from SA aren't even listed under a network...