07/25/2007 09:00:44 PM 
(1) 
(1) Some strange findings:
Hong Kong's population is bigger than China's
Australia's population is bigger than France, Germany and Italy's combined
London's population is much bigger than New York and Los Angeles combined.
Countries
Kazakhstan 1,859
Bahrain 5,879
Senegal 412
Bolivia 4,900
Italy 21,754
Germany 47,004
France 52,494
China 28.046
Hong kong 43,106
Australia 185,450
Kuwait 10,741
Phillipines 9,476
Cities
London 823,536
Glasgow 19,568
New York 290,599
Los Angeles 156,494
Posted by Ed Cotton
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Ed, Great blog, and an interesting question. I don't know, but I suspect it has something to do with English speaking universities vs. universities where other languages are spoken. The seeding for Facebook came from universities (hence the name, used in the US to describe a publication of photos of incoming students) with open registration to Facebook only coming on recently. So the established base came from US and UK universities and their friends/family. Over time, this effect will probably fade as more people with no university affiliation join on. This would explain why Facebook does better in Hong Kong than the rest of China; there are several Hong Kong universities where instruction is in English, and there is a concentration of English-taught ex-pats and returning Chinese there. It would also explain why Australia does better than Continental European countries, as English-speaking Australians might find the all-English interface more famliar than their French, German, and Italian counterparts. It doesn't explain London's primacy, although it might have something to do with class and the late onset of broadband adoption in the UK. In the US, the adoption of MySpace was a much bigger deal earlier. As a result, Facebook has not been as novel a social application as it has been in the UK. Also, in the US, according to research by Danah Boyd at UCLA, the university-focused approach of Facebook has led to a class-based stratification; military enlisted men are MySpace users, whereas officers are Facebook users. My suspicion is that there is less of this divide in the UK, where the uptake of internet social services has largely followed the rollout of local-loop unbundling (and therefore broadband availability in the home at affordable prices.) This delay might have caused a slower uptake of MySpace, with the general population joining Facebook all at once. Again, I have no data, but they're the best hypotheses I've got. - Dan Ng, DDB London