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.

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It’s no secret that Yahoo has seen brighter days and that Google has come to utterly dominate the Web in a way that Yahoo just can’t compete with anymore.

But lo and behold, there are still some places where Yahoo is ranked higher than Google. They’re few and far between, but they do exist, and in some pretty big markets, too.

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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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It doesn’t feel like 2000 was all that long ago, does it? But on the Internet, a decade is a long time. Ten years ago we were in the era of the dot-com boom (and bust), the Web was strictly 1.0, and Google was just a baby.

Since then people have welled onto the Internet. You don’t actually realize how many more people are on the Internet now until you start comparing numbers. This article is an in-depth study of how the number of Internet users has grown in the past decade.

We’ll start with the whole world, then world regions, then break it down even further into countries. As you’ll see, a lot has happened.

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Although the growth of Firefox has stagnated a bit lately due to the increasing competition from rival browsers, it’s still one of the biggest success stories in the history of the Internet and has the second-largest user base of any web browser.

Firefox has a widespread global user base, but we wanted to find out where it is most common, or another way of looking at it: how are the Firefox users distributed?

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The world is a big place, but so is the Internet. We know which countries are the largest in the real world, but what about on the Internet?

This article examines which countries are the largest in terms of Internet users, and will also look into their growth potential. That last point is very interesting to look at, because it’s an indication of how the power balance on the Internet might shift in the future.

But before we head on to the charts, let’s start with a few interesting findings.

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That Twitter has been expanding well outside the borders of the United States is well known. It’s becoming a global social media phenomenon and much of its growth is currently coming from this international expansion. We thought it would be interesting to investigate where Twitter is growing the fastest right now.

By looking at traffic data to Twitter.com, we’ve identified several countries where Twitter is currently growing rapidly (this year). These are not necessarily countries that have a ton of Twitter users yet, but rather places where the traffic curve is pointing sharply upwards.

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We hear mostly about the social networking sites where English is the predominant language, like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. But what about those sites where the vast majority of users don’t speak or use English? We don’t hear about those very much.

But that doesn’t mean they’re not out there. And many are doing extremely well. One of them is even big enough to rival Facebook in sheer user count.

The social networking sites we list below have reached an overwhelming popularity outside of the (native) English-speaking population, often being local hits in one or just a few countries and a specific language.

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Customer service goes hand in hand with a smile, and none take this more seriously than the Japanese. But how serious are they really about smiling? Apparently, very serious:

In a positively Orwellian move, 15 Tokyo railway stations will be equipped with smile detectors to make sure that their staff is smiling enough. Frowns will literally be frowned upon. High tech meets mood control.

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Many of the major websites have localized versions of their pages for different countries. Most of the time it’s just a plain translation of their “regular” website (for example Apple Japan, Yahoo Japan and MSN Japan, to name just a few), but sometimes localization is taken a BIG step further.

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