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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Remember domain tasting? At its worst, millions of domain names were yanked up and dropped every day in this rather nasty scheme that abused the five-day “add grace period” for domain registrations. Things were bad, really bad. Back in 2006-2007, a full 94% of domain registrations were the result of domain tasting, only 6% were legitimate, permanent registrations.

Domain tasting was largely killed off by some policy changes from ICANN in 2008 (with a final death blow early in 2009), so we thought it was interesting to see this historical chart of .com domain names that actually showed visual evidence of the practice, and when it disappeared.

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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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Text and numbers are all good and well, but sometimes it’s nice to just be presented with a nice visual.

This post is full of videos of just that, interesting visualizations of data. Being the geeks we are, they’re of course all related to the Web and the Internet.

Enjoy!

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Enormous amounts of email circulate the Internet every day, there can be no doubt about that. But how does the amount of email compare with that of traditional mail, also known as “snail mail”?

It would be interesting to know, wouldn’t it?

We’ve done the research and done the math, so look no further than the small infographic we’ve put together here below, a comparison of email and snail mail volumes in the United States.

Enjoy!

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In July we had a look at the worldwide state of the Internet. Now the time has come for something a bit more specific, the state of the Internet in Europe. We’ll look at this from two angles. First, which countries in Europe have the most Internet users, and second, which countries have the highest Internet penetration. Both are relevant in their own right.

Since Europe is such a diverse market with a multitude of countries and different languages, it makes sense to look at these countries separately. This contrary to the trend where people sometimes try to think of the European Union (much of, but not all of, Europe) as some kind of equivalent of the United States. The language issue alone makes the comparison moot.

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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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The iPad has made a huge splash in a very short time, and this in spite of only being available in the United States. Now that its release in other countries is getting closer every day, where is anticipation the hottest? Which countries are the most interested in the iPad?

This is one area where Google can come to the rescue of Apple (something we haven’t seen much of lately). Google Insights for Search can show the “regional interest” for various terms. When a brand name is involved, like the iPad, it becomes very useful since it will be same all over the world and will reflect interest in that brand or product. We used this tool to research the overall global interest in the iPad, and also where in the United States it’s most popular.

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Instant messaging. We all use it, whether it be Skype, Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, or some other IM client or platform. We’ve come a long way since the days of ICQ, when IM as a phenomenon really took off. IM is now such an intricate part of our experience of the internet that we thought an infographic on the subject was in order. Enjoy!

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How many users do the various web browsers really have? We often hear about market share percentages, but we rarely get to see any actual user numbers.

So let’s try to estimate how many people are using Internet Explorer, Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari and Opera. Not in market share percentages, but the actual number of people.

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