Facebook intern Paul Butler can probably do all of that very well, but more interesting to me is what he’s done with his access to Facebook’s giant treasure trove of data on its user base.
“I was interested in seeing how geography and political borders affected where people lived relative to their friends,” Butler wrote. “I wanted a visualization that would show which cities had a lot of friendships between them.”
So Butler took about a 2% sample of friendship pairs from Facebook’s data warehouse, Apache Hive. ”I combined that data with each user’s current city and summed the number of friends between each pair of cities,” he wrote. “Then I merged the data with the longitude and latitude of each city.”
Nice work Paul!
Facebook in numbers
| FACEBOOK USAGE AND INTERNET STATISTICS FOR AUGUST 31, 2010 | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Geographic World Regions |
Population ( 2010 Est.) |
Facebook Users |
Facebook Penetration |
Facebook Index(*) |
Internet Users |
Internet Penetration |
| Asia | 3,834,792,852 | 93,584,580 | 2.4 % | 11.3 % | 828,930,856 | 21.6 % |
| Africa | 1,013,779,050 | 17,607,440 | 1.7 % | 15.9 % | 110,948,420 | 10.9 % |
| Europe | 813,319,511 | 162,104,640 | 19.9 % | 34.1 % | 475,121,735 | 58.4 % |
| Latin America | 550,924,250 | 68,189,920 | 12.4 % | 35.0 % | 195,042,230 | 30.4 % |
| North America | 344,124,450 | 149,054,040 | 43.3 % | 56.0 % | 266,224,500 | 77.4 % |
| Middle East | 212,336,924 | 11,698,120 | 5.5 % | 18.5 % | 63,240,946 | 29.8 % |
| The Caribbean | 41,632,722 | 3,925,060 | 9.4 % | 39.0 % | 10,055,240 | 24.2 % |
| Oceania / Australia | 34,700,201 | 11,596,660 | 33.4 % | 54.5 % | 21,272,470 | 61.3 % |
| WORLD TOTAL | 6,845,609,960 | 517,760,460 | 7.6 % | 26.3 % | 1,970,837,003 | 28.8 % |
source: http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats25.htm
Facebook Index corresponds to the ratio of Facebook users in relation to the total number of estimated Internet users in each country or world region, expressed as a percentage.
FACEBOOK INDEX = FB USERS x 100% / INTERNET USERS
From that data we can say that 50% of people going online in US, most likely will use facebook, in europe it is 35% . Places where facebook is not that popular are Asia, Africa and Middle East. Between 10-20% of people going online in this areas are using facebook.
This can explained by specification of Chinese market for instance. Which either Google or Facebook found difficult to operate on. Also they have their own social networking sites (as well search engine), equaly popular in China as Facebook in US or Europe. Same situation we have in Russia. That is why you can see huge black areas there.
Then we have africe, where Internet penetration is consideribly quite low. Even if there people online, becouse of social aspects of Facebook site, those people might find Facebook not such attractive as American/Europeans.
It is simple effect, Facebook is so popular becouse its huge number of memebers. Why would you use facebook if your school mates, or work mates, or other friends are not on it? That is why Africa is lower in this rank. We have to remember also that live standart is diffrent. Where social interactions might be not so important as lower level needs are not fullfilled, like safty, food, well being etc. The same principle would apply to all so called developing or third-world countries.
Would those be areas which hungry corporate giants like Facebook or Google will be targeting?
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