Facebook Takes Over the Universe, By the Numbers

SiteImpulse’s Website Monitoring Blog has produced a graphic (seen below) that mashes together all of the Facebook usage figures in one place. Though much of this is already publicly available, it’s good to see it aggregated in one place. Two of those data points of most interest to us are:

— 1.5 million local businesses have set up pages

— 100 million (out of 500 million total) active mobile users

Again, these have already been made public, but are interesting if taken together and added with a third element: Facebook’s rumored announcement to “turn on” geolocation tomorrow. The latter could involve location check-ins  that are either proprietary or federated from services like Foursquare.

It could also mean automated (but opt-in) geolocation annotations to status updates. That’s an interseting concept if you think about “where I am” adding a dimension to the “what I’m doing” that has become a centerpiece of the Facebook experience. It’s especially relevant for the 100 million mobile users.

Viewed in light of 1.5 million local business fan pages, Facebook is suddenly in an interesting position to put together buyer and seller in locally relevant ways. This has a ways to develop and Facebook’s privacy scrutiny will force it to tread carefully (especially with all things location), but you can start to connect the dots.

We’ll know much more tomorrow.

Mike Boland

Mike Boland is an analyst with the Kelsey Group.

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