United States, Canada, the UK, Australia and … Norway?

Recent numbers collected from Facebook by a Norwegian radio channel, Kanal 24, places Norway as the fifth largest country currently on Facebook. Take a moment to consider this. Norway – a country with 4.7 million inhabitants – is the fifth larges country when it comes to Facebook users, passed by the US (roughly 300 million), Canada (33 million), the UK (60 million) and Australia (21 million). Four native English speakers, and then Norway. There are two things that can be gathered from this information:

1) Everyone in Norway uses Facebook.

This is true. There are some seven hundred thousand accounts on Facebook listed as Norwegian. But even more importantly, one in every six Norwegian reports to have been logged in to Facebook at one point over the last month. This is key, as it shows that a very high number of accounts are in regular use, and not just a number floating around in the cloud. It is an established fact that the number of active users is the key factor to look for when judging a social networking site. The overall accounts come in to play only when they are seen in relation to other factors (like active accounts).

2) Facebook’s international initiative is failing

It’s got to be said: When a country with 4.7 million people manage to get to number five in the ranking of largest Facebook countries (and these are the actual numbers, mind, not some relative number), Facebooks reach into non native-english markets is not doing too well. One can argue that the since Norways relative number is so high, it’ll take a while for others to catch up – this is a flawed argument, at best. The internet is global, and not just global within the four large English speaking countries mentioned.

Facebook’s growth has been tremendous; from a small campus based phenomenon in 2004, to one of the web’s largest sites with 32 milion users today. Along the way Facebook has taken some important decisions along the way to keep growing (like opening registration to all users, and opening up for developers through their API), but for Facebook to keep up this phenomenal growth it needs to realize that there is a world outside the the English sphere – and on the internet it’s only a dot foreign domain away.

Via Dagens it (Norwegian website – go figure)