ANIMATION: How Facebook (almost) took over the world

Over the past two years, Italian blogger Vincenzo Cosenza has been carefully analyzing and mapping the dominant social networking sites in various countries, using publicly-available data from Google Trends and Alexa. He published his latest findings for December 2010 on his website, along with his previous visualizations. GMANews.TV was able to compile Cosenza's work into a short animation, showing exactly how Facebook took over most of the world one country at a time in less than two years:

Click on the graphic above to view a higher-resolution version of the animated visualization. Original graphic: Vincenzo Cosenza. Animation: TJ Dimacali

Facebook's 'relentless march' "(This) shows the relentless march of Facebook, which is now close to reaching 600 million 'residents'. At the moment, it appears to be the social network of choice of 115 out of the 132 countries analyzed," Cosenza said. The above animation clearly shows the rapid march of progress that Facebook has enjoyed over the past two years. However, it must be remembered that this map does not take into account the population densities of the various countries. This means that, although Russia's VKontakte may seem to be a potent adversary to Facebook, that country's population density means that there might be fewer users of the network than is apparent in the above animation. VKontakte's home page currently boasts that the network has over 103 million members — versus Facebook's 147 million users in the US alone. Philippine insights In the Philippines, interestingly enough, Friendster was the dominant social network until as late as December 2009, when much of the world had already switched to Facebook. In the last six months of that year, Facebook had gained substantial ground in North America and Central Asia — particularly in Mexico and India. However, despite having jumped onto the bandwagon relatively late, the Philippines has already outstripped both countries in less than a year: according to the latest SocialBakers statistics, the Philippines has the sixth largest number of Facebook users in the world, followed by Mexico in seventh place and India in tenth place. Cosenza's findings corroborate reports earlier this year from Internet marketing research firm ComScore, which showed that social networking engagement in the Philippines is the fifth largest in the world and the highest in the Asia-Pacific. You can view Cosenza's original static poster graphic here. - JV, GMANews.TV