If Facebook was a country it would be the largest country in the world

It used to take new technologies on average 15 years to reach market maturity. At their introduction, things like motorcars and telephones were not particularly popular with the general public and many predicted them as just a fad. Even radio and television took years to become commonplace in homes.

But during the 1990’s US industry spending on technology exceeded the combined spending on agriculture, industrial, transportation, and all other equipment. Spending on technology in many other countries also grew incredibly fast.

One of the results is that the world became a global village, one big facebook. In fact, if Facebook was a country it would be the 4th 3rd largest country in the world.

Update: In July 2010, the 500th million person registered a profile on Facebook. Thus, if Facebook was a country it would be the 3rd largest country in the world. Unless you bring QQ into the equation; it has about 600 million registered users.
Update again: By 2016, Facebook had 1.7 billion users, which would make it the largest country in the world by population.

(China is the most populous with 1.3 billion citizens, followed by India that has a population of 1.2 billion people. The world population currently is 6.9 7.4 billion people.)

Yet, even though the Internet population has grown to 1.8 3.4 billion users it still lags behind the fastest growing technology in history, the cell phone.

Interestingly, it took the cell phone also many years to become commonplace. Cell phones were developed in the 1940s, introduced in 1978 but became an ubiquitous item only in the 2000s. But cell phones enjoyed the fastest uptake with more than 3 billion people acquiring cell phones during the past 6 years; more than 4 6 billion people now own a cell phones. Which is almost as many people that listen to radio.

The Social Media Revolution

Factoids:

The phrase “global village” was coined in 1960 by Marshall McLuhan

The phrase “information superhighway” was coined in 1974 by Nam June Paik

The phrase “world wide web” was coined in 1990 by Tim Berners Lee

The phrase “the Face Book” was coined in 2003 by Aaron Greenspan

Cell phones have replaced wrist watches as the main means of telling time

More cell phones have Internet access than PCs.