The facebook as a mirror

If anyone has any doubts about the Internet not having changed the lives of Indians, they just have to look at the social networking site, Facebook, for an answer.

Indians today are among the leaders in the world in using Facebook and of its 668 million users, 23.85 million are from India alone. India ranks second among Facebook users in the world and  Bangalore ranks among the tops three Facebook users in India and their numbers seem to be growing. 

Interestingly, Mumbai, where the IT story of India began in the late 1960s leads the number of Facebook users with 3.6 million who form an impressive 15 per cent of the total Facebook users in the country.

Delhi and Bangalore stand at number two and third on the Facebook users list in India. If Delhi has 1.57 million users, Bangalore is a trifle short of that number at 1.56 million users. However if you take the world scale of Facebook users, Mumbai stands 18^th in the list, Delhi 36 and Bangalore 38^th.

Chennai and Hyderabad occupy the fourth and fifth place with 1.2 and 1.81 million users and on the global index they are ranked in the 49th and 50th positions.

The other Indian cities which figure in the Facebook list are Pune, Calcutta, Ahmedabad, Indore and Surat.

Jakarta in Indonasia heads the list of top cities on Facebook with 17.48 million users, followed by  Istanbul and Mexico city with  9.6 million and 9.3 million Facebook users respectively.

In terms of checking into places, Bangalore International Airport leads the race with 41664, followed by New Delhi Railway station 8,778.

Facebook boasts of 51 million userbase in India in 2012 (51,204,840), which once stood at 8 million in 2010 and 28 million in June 2011.

Digitalbuzzblog.com says that Facebook with over 500 million users is now being used by one in every 13 people on Earth, with over 250 million of them (over 50 per cent) who log in every day.

As far as Indian cities go, the Facebook phenomenon seems to be marching ahead steadily.

The cities which have active Facebook users are:
1) Delhi: 5,123,180
2) Chennai: 2,195,760
3) Bangalore: 3,076,260
4) Hyderabad: 2,284,340
5) Pune: 1,1913,640
6) Kolkata: 1,591,120
7) Ahmedabad: 892,560
8) Chandigarh: 670,500
9) Lucknow: 608,120
10) Surat: 508,360
11) Indore: 503,020
12) Nagpur: 423,080
13) Bhopal: 423,000
14) Thiruvananthapuram: 288,160
15) Guwahati: 248,860
16) Rajkot: 241,500

As this post is being readied, India has overtaken Brazil as the country with the second highest number of Facebook users. However a startling paradox is that the total Internet penetration in India is less than 10 per cent and this is borne out by surveys from Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) and other organisations.

In UK and USA, the internet penetration is 80 per cent.

Whatever it is, Indians seem to have taken to facebook like a duck to water. Facebook is a social networking site launched in February 2004 and it is owned and operated by Facebook Inc.

As of September 2012, Facebook has over one billion active users, more than half of whom use it on a mobile device.

Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg with his college roommates and fellow Harvard University students Eduardo Saverin, Andrew Mccollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Huges. The website's membership was initially limited to Harvard students, but later it was expanded to include students from other  colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League and Stanford.

It gradually expanded and today look at where it stands.

List of countries and Facebook users as on October 29, 2012.

Ranking	Country	Number of users (millions)
1.	United States	167.64
2.	Brazil	60.74
3.	India	60.62
4.	Indonesia	50.53
5.	Mexico	39.42
6.	United Kingdom	33.23
7.	Turkey	31.43
8.	Philippines	29.87
9.	France	25.32
10.	Germany	24.99
11.	Italy	22.84
12.	Argentina	20.43
13.	Canada	18.59
14.	Colombia	17.48
15.	Thailand	17.47
16.	Spain	17.34
17.	Japan	16.36
18.	Malaysia	13.22
19.	Taiwan	13.06
20.	Australia	11.72
21.	Egypt	11.63
22.	Venezuela	10.00
23.	Chile	9.75
24.	Peru	9.58
25.	Poland	9.44
26.	Vietnam	9.43
27.	South Korea	9.37
28.	Pakistan	7.49
29.	Netherlands	7.34
30.	Russia	7.15
31.	Nigeria	6.71
32.	South Africa	6.55
33.	Saudi Arabia	5.86
34.	Romania	5.10
35.	Ecuador	5.08
36.	Morocco	4.92
37.	Sweden	4.90
38.	Belgium	4.87
39.	Portugal	4.62
40.	Hungary	4.22
41.	Hong Kong	4.06
42.	Greece	3.88
43.	Algeria	3.86
44.	Czech Republic	3.80
45.	Israel	3.78
46.	Serbia	3.35
47.	United Arab Emirates	3.30
48.	Bangladesh	3.29
49.	Tunisia	3.25
50.	Swaziland	3.02

Source: Facebook

Socialbakers, a social media analyst, says that the number of Facebook users in India is galloping at a staggering 22 percent every six months, and this means that it will dethrone the United States as the country with the highest number of users by the end of 2014, when both countries are projected to have 170 million to 175 million members.

Facebook itself in its annual report to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC))for its quarter ending December 31, 2012, said India has 71 million monthly active users (MAUs). It says this figure mirrors a 54 per cent increase from the same quarter last year and a 9.2 per cent increase sequentially.

It said 30 per cent of its Indian users access the service only through mobile phones.Facebook today is a mirror of all that is going on in India. It can be called as a mirror of our times, albeit a digital one.

Facebook currently has more than 150 billion friend connections as of December 31, 2012 and there were more than 50 million Pages with ten or more likes. Besides, more than 350 million photos per day were uploaded in the fourth quarter of 2012 and over 240 billion photos have been shared. These figures do not include user uploads on Instagram, which Facebook acquired last year.