Social networks are getting huge. So big, in fact, that many of them are competing in size with some of the largest countries in the world.
To give you (and us) a nice and visual overview of how today’s social networks stack up against countries in terms of sheer size, we have put together this chart:
Some quick observations:
- Apparently the Chinese social network QZone is even bigger than Facebook.
- Facebook is bigger than Russia.
- MySpace is pretty close in size to Mexico.
- LinkedIn, Bebo and Xanga are bigger than Canada.
- Considering Twitter’s strong growth, it won’t be long until it’s bigger than Sweden.
- Orkut is larger (barely) than France.
- And finally: Does EVERYONE in the Philippines have a Friendster account? Both Friendster and the Philippines have a population of 90 million. We had heard it’s popular there, but still… 🙂
If we view the Internet as a virtual companion to the real world, then social networks could be considered countries in this virtual world. And as you can see, these countries are getting enormous. It will be interesting to see how this develops over the next few years. How large can they get?
Data sources: Country populations are from Wikipedia. Social network sizes are always difficult to find reliable, up-to-date sources for, but we did our best: The numbers for MySpace, Friendster, Bebo, Xanga, Imeem, Last.fm and Twitter are all from Wikipedia. The QZone number is from here. The Facebook number is from here.The Windows Live Spaces number is from here. The LinkedIn number is from here. The Livejournal number is from here. The Orkut number is from here.
