Facebook recently passed an incredible milestone, 500 million active users. And it keeps growing.

Although Facebook initially focused on the United States, it soon turned its eyes towards the horizon and the rest of the world. And it’s a tactic that’s been working extremely well. Facebook’s current user base is more than 1.6 times the size of the entire US population. If Facebook were a country, it’d be second only to China and India.

And speaking of countries… Now that it’s gone global, which countries have the most users on Facebook?

Top countries on Facebook

Since we don’t have actual user numbers and demographics from Facebook itself (only Facebook has those), we looked at per-country traffic estimates to Facebook.com. The result is quite interesting. (We used data from Google Ad Planner, which provides traffic stats for a large number of sites.)

These were the top 10, but there are of course a lot of countries that have a ton of Facebook users. To continue the list, the countries ranking 11-20 are:

Malaysia (12 million), Spain (12 million), the Philippines (10 million), Australia (9.1 million), Argentina (8.2 million), Taiwan (8.2 million), Colombia (7.5 million), Brazil (6.2 million), Chile (6.2 million), Thailand (6.2 million).

Estimated monthly visitors to Facebook.com shown in parenthesis.

Additional observations

Google Ad Planner estimates worldwide monthly visitors to Facebook.com to 550 million. This is slightly higher than the 500 million active users Facebook says it has, but on the other hand, not all visitors to Facebook.com need to have an account. Still, we’ll use the 550-million number in the calculations here below to be consistent (i.e. to avoid mixing data from different sources, which can give misleading results).

• The United States alone accounts for almost 24% of Facebook’s users.
• The United States has 4.6 times as many Facebook users as the second-largest country on Facebook, the United Kingdom.
• The top 10 countries on Facebook account for almost 58% of its users.

The rest of the countries account for the “long tail” that makes Facebook the colossus it has become.

Final words

Facebook’s international expansion is well under way, and it’s arguably the largest and most wide-spread social network that ever existed. As Facebook grows on a global level, the current US dominance of the social network will gradually diminish and become more similar to the general distribution of Internet users.

Mark Zuckerberg has stated that it’s almost a guarantee that Facebook will one day hit 1 billion users, and at the current rate, it’s certainly looking possible. Considering there are close to 2 billion Internet users in the world, there’s still plenty of room to grow.

The New England Patriots held what seemed to be a commanding lead (17-15) with five minutes left of Super Bowl XLVI last night. But the New York Giants came back and managed to win with 21-17.

As exciting as the game sounds, we missed the whole thing, instead spending our time watching the Superbowl.com website.

It turned out to be a rather dull thing to do because the site held up well and there was no downtime at all. The response time also didn’t give away anything significant in terms of online Super Bowl traffic.

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As Super Bowl 46 is approaching, fans will flock to the Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, Indiana, and to TV sets around the world to follow the New York Giants battle it out with the New England Patriots.

Kickoff is scheduled for 6:30EST on Sunday, February 5, and we’re already monitoring Superbowl.com to see how the site will handle the event.

What team will win Super Bowl 46? How will the site cope? We can only wait to find out.

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Every Friday we bring you a collection of links to places on the web that we find particularly newsworthy, interesting, entertaining, and topical. We try to focus on some particular area or topic each week, but in general we will cover Internet, web development, networking, performance, and other geeky topics.h

This week we bring you a collection of articles focusing on cloud, with a few other topics thrown in to boot.

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Out of the 59 US-based e-commerce sites we monitored during the holiday season last year 28 scored a perfect 100% uptime for December.

Whether this helped spur on the booming sales in the US, we don’t know, but retail e-commerce spending in the US reached $37.2 billion for the November to December 2011 period. That was an increase of 15% from the same period in 2010.

We decided to dig into the numbers for these e-commerce sites to see how well they did in terms of uptime and performance. After massaging the data coming from our Pingdom probes, it turns out that the sites overall performed well during December 2011 in terms of uptime, but response time was an issue for several sites.

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Pingdom’s Mobile Podcast is a weekly show about Internet, web, and mobile stuff.

In this show, Saleh also gives us an update on the pending submission of his Carbon for Windows Phone Twitter client. We’re also joined by Mario Lurig, who talks about using Amazon S3 and Cloudfront to speed up a website.

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