We’ve mentioned the tremendous growth of Facebook at numerous occasions on this blog, and it’s fascinating how fast the social network has risen from being an upstart fighting with MySpace to basically leaving the entire social media landscape behind in the dust.

Since Facebook is now so ginormous (that’s the scientific term for it, right?) we wanted to give you a frame of reference for how big the service has become. And as we so often do, we’ve done it with a chart.

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Although Facebook is by far the largest social network out there, the social network sphere is large and has a ton of players. We were curious about which of them are the most active. To find these sites, we decided to focus on the number of daily visitors to each site.

The number of (unique) daily visitors is an interesting metric since it doesn’t rely on registered users (who may or may not be active) or monthly visitors, where some may visit the site as seldom as once per month. In short, you get a good idea of the day-to-day activity on a site.

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In most countries today, Facebook is either the most popular, or second or third most popular website. The social network has reached such widespread popularity that it can these days only really be compared to Google, the only other company that can brag about a similar reach.

But Facebook isn’t in the top everywhere. There are still several countries where Facebook hasn’t been able to reach a dominant position (at least not yet).

Which countries? Read on to find out.

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Think what you will about Facebook, but the main social network of choice today has become so big and so prevalent that there’s no escaping it. And we spend an almost ridiculous amount of time on Facebook. Another behemoth that is virtually everywhere and used by everyone is YouTube. You may have heard of it.

Let us walk you through some numbers for these two sites to give you an idea of how much they are being used worldwide and the massive amount of time we are spending on them.

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In what has become something of a yearly tradition, it’s now time for us to present 10 of the most noteworthy incidents on the Internet from this past year. As you’ll see, 2010 has been very interesting.

Just like previous years, we have included problems ranging from website outages and service issues to large-scale network interruptions. If you’re an avid Web user, you are bound to recognize several of them.

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“What if Google does it?”

That has to be a pretty common question among startups when they discuss their business plans. Gaining Google as a sudden competitor is usually not good news.

The problem is, no matter how brilliant your software or service may be, there’s always a cloud on the horizon. There are elephants out there, the likes of Google, Microsoft, Apple, and now also Facebook, and those elephants can come crashing into your glass house at any time. All they need to do is release a similar product.

It happens all the time.

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Google is doing it. Facebook is doing it. Yahoo is doing it. Microsoft is doing it. And soon Twitter will be doing it.

We’re talking about the apparent need of every web service out there to add intermediate steps to sample what we click on before they send us on to our real destination. This has been going on for a long time and is slowly starting to build into something of a redirect hell on the Web.

And it has a price.

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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?

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At the scale that Facebook operates, a lot of traditional approaches to serving web content break down or simply aren’t practical. The challenge for Facebook’s engineers has been to keep the site up and running smoothly in spite of handling close to half a billion active users. This article takes a look at some of the software and techniques they use to accomplish that.

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If Facebook has its way (and it usually does), over the coming years a ton of websites and online services will become part of the open graph that Facebook is promoting, with Facebook firmly planted in the middle. The concept is very interesting, and the potential for this web of data from a wide variety of sources is enormous. You could say that Facebook will tie all our information, and the whole web, together.

There’s just one problem (two, if you count privacy): When the web becomes “interconnected” with Facebook, it also means that when Facebook breaks, the web breaks. In short, Facebook becomes a single point of failure for the web.

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