It’s a small world (compared to social networking)

I have just spent the last few days presenting sessions on CSP to partners in Kuala Lumpur and Brisbane, which is quite literally on the other side of the world to where I normally reside.  However I did manage to catch up with some old friends in Sydney (it’s a small world) on the weekend, which was great fun; and also caught up on old blog posts that I have been meaning to read (slightly less fun).

I read a blog posting on Shift Happens, and downloaded the presentation.  Great set of slides, and really interesting take on some statistics.  So following on from my last post on how Obama is using technology I was quite shocked to some of the stats on the size of social networking sites/technology. So how big are they compared to counties???  Here is the list, comparing the number of active users in the last month vs. population size (figures from Wikipedia.

Position Country/Site Size
1 People’s Republic of China 1,326,640,000
2 India 1,139,240,000
3 United States 305,405,000
4 MSN Messenger 240,000,000
5 Indonesia 228,412,000
6 Brazil 187,878,000
7 Pakistan 164,582,000
8 Bangladesh 158,665,000
9 Nigeria 148,093,000
10 Russia 141,900,000
11 Facebook 132,100,000
12 Japan 127,690,000
13 Mexico 106,682,000
     

OK, so I have to admit – 240 million active users of Messenger a month was larger that I was expecting; especially as if it were a country that would place it fourth in the world….  Should government take note of Social Networking and the technology and sites that sit around it?  I think that will be a yes….

Thanks, James

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