Facebook is growing internationally

Facebook is growing fast not only in the United States but also in other countries. Not too long ago, Facebook was lagging behind other social networking sites in non-US countries. In the past 12 months, Facebook has grown eightfold in Brazil with 500 millions users, and it has as many users as Orkut's in India. According to Mark Zuckerberg, it's almost guarantee for Facebook to hit 1 billion users (i.e., ~1/7th of the world population in 2010).

Some analysts believe that Facebook is a threat to Google. Both companies rely on ads as a main source of income. While Google can learn a lot of about users' interests from search queries, but Facebook has far more usable personal data. Because Facebook can place more effective ads than Google, eventually Facebook will absorb some market shares from Google.

It will be interesting to see what comes out of these two companies in the next couple years.

Source: Facebook Makes Headway Around the World -- The New York Times