At the recent F8 conference Facebook revealed that they now have 800 million active users. Europe, with Russia included, has a population of 727 million. We now have a social network that is so large that it could fill up a major world region with people and still have some to spare (this “spare” being twice the size of Canada’s entire population).

Another cool comparison is that Facebook now has as many users as the entire Internet did back in 2004, the year Facebook was founded.

For fun, here are some other size comparisons you can make.

The size of Facebook’s active user base is…

• 38% of the entire current Internet population
• 87% of the Internet population of Asia
• 168% of the Internet population of Europe
• 294% of the Internet population of North America
• 370% of the Internet population of Latin America
• 674% of the Internet population of Africa
• 1,167% of the Internet population of the Middle East
• 3,757% of the Internet population of Oceania / Australia

And comparing it with the entire population of a few selected countries, we get this:

As a companion to the visual above, here you have the actual size relationships:

Facebook’s active user base is…

• 2.5x the population of the United States
• 3.9x the population of Brazil
• 5.8x the population of Russia
• 6.3x the population of Japan
• 9.7x the population of Germany
• 12.4x the population of France
• 13x the population of the United Kingdom
• 13.8x the population of Italy
• 19.7x the population of Spain
• 23.5x the population of Canada
• 36.6x the population of Australia
• 76.7x the population of Belgium
• 88x the population of Sweden
• 144.6x the population of Denmark
• 185.7x the population of Ireland
• Only India and China have populations larger than Facebook.

Note that the second chart compares entire populations, not just Internet populations (Internet users).

These numbers are pretty mind-boggling. Where will it all end? There’s still plenty of room left for Facebook to grow, but how massive can it get before it grinds to a halt?

Data sources: Population data from GeoHive. Internet user numbers from Internet World Stats.

But wait, there’s more! If you liked this post, check out this chart showing Facebook’s growth through the years, put into perspective by country populations, Internet stats, etc.: Facebook’s ginormous size put into context

Do you live in a country that loves Apple’s iPad? Most of us probably think we do, but we wanted to be able to tell you for sure. So even though we have written about the iPad many times before, it’s now time for us to tackle this hotly contested topic again.

Read on to find out, which countries are the most iPad-friendly.

Perhaps you live in one of them.

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Display resolutions are increasing every year, something that’s being taken to its extreme with the recent “retina display” trend that came with the latest iPad. The jump in onscreen pixels is massive, and such displays are soon bound to make their way into regular laptops and desktop displays, perhaps as soon as this year.

This development will have a profound effect on the size of the graphics resources necessary for websites, which ultimately will make websites bigger, more bloated and slower to download. That is, if we don’t change tactics.

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The juggernaut that is Facebook is quickly approaching 1 billion users, so the social network is growing at a rapid pace overall.

But if we look at some of the latest figures available, it would seem that Zuckerberg’s creation is not gaining users in every corner of the world.

In fact, in one country, Facebook has lost 16% of its users over the last six months, the equivalent of over 200,000 users. But in another country, Facebook has gained almost 17 million users over the same period.

What countries are we talking about, you ask? Read on and we’ll tell you.

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Developers who want a portable computer to code on, which is thin, light, sleek and yet powerful, may now be getting another option in an ultrabook from Dell. What makes the “Sputnik” ultrabook different is that it runs Ubuntu 12.04 Linux and it’s tailor-made for developers.

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, security, and other geeky topics.

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“Photograph what is close to you. Share it with the world!“ That’s one of the headlines on Aday.org, a global project that will attempt to document what goes around the world in one day.

This all takes place on Tuesday May 15, 2012, and Pingdom will be participating.

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