Canada is all about FaceBook! Big time.
{ April 24th, 2007 }
So I am an admitted face book junkie. It appears that I am not alone. Facebook has gripped Canada in a frenzy. I wanted to take a look at what the rest of Canada was thinking about FaceBook. I have been very surprised at the people that I have found on the system. It has extended beyond the tech savvy community or the highschool and college communities ….it has hit everywhere.
I started to look at the community groups and i was really surprised at what I was finding the adoption has not just been limited to the metropolitan areas of this country. Infact when looking at the community size as a percentage of the census population data it was quite shocking.
I looked at 2 cities in the US to see how the adoption compared to the rest of Canada. I looked at San Francisco and Boston. Two cities that are on the bleeding edge of technology. I figured that this would be a quick and informal peak at the adoption.
Boston – 596, 638 pop – 136,525 FB community – 22.88% adoption
San Francisco – 739,426 – 48,484 FB community – 6.56% adoption
So what can we take from this?
- Do people in smaller communities rural people understand relationships better than urban people? It would seem that there has to be something to this. This isn’t a new idea and it is something that I have heard batted around in the past and I think that this puts some numbers to it.
- Are the smaller communities going to be the best prepared for a future that is based on social media and social interaction? I think that smaller communities are open to any technology that bridge the distance between people.
- What can business learn from this? Join in … become part of these conversations ? Start a business group for your office or company. Use this as a tool.
- What should government learn from this? Government should learn one thing ….quite wasting your our money on failing community portals. (I am looking at you my www.sudbury.ca)
The adoption for Facebook continues to increase in every single community that I referenced. In the writing of this i had to go back and look at the numbers as i had let this sit for a few days What is the limit? Will any of these communities see 50% adoption?
(In the 30 minutes that I have been writing this Sudbury Group is +18 to 34,048. I suggest revisiting the network pages to see the growth for your network)
I am glad to see that I am not alone in my addiction to FaceBook. My only suggestion ‘come on man try it ….everyone is doing it’
Cheers
Scott ‘FB Junkie’ Brooks
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April 24th, 2007 at 10:38 am
I don’t necessarily think that people in smaller communities understand relationships better than urban folks. I think it’s more of a function of having nothing better to discuss; small communities breed small worlds and simple lifestyles.
Think of Facebook as a great social “it†gimmick of right now for the masses.
In smaller isolated communities (Sudbury for example) there is definitely a greater emphasis (ingrained in the culture) on community chatter as well as the constant knowledge of what your neighbors and friends are up to (past, present and future) regardless if you have shared the information or via community gossip. This is how small communities operate.
Don’t get me wrong or take my opening statement in a negative way, but I grew up in a small community (158k) and by my 19 years of observations (from mainly a socio-technical point of view), smaller communities initially adopt a social addiction such as the new toy Facebook because they see it as a way to further tighten their relationships with others. Via Facebook’s clean and intuitive interface, it easily facilitates users to connect with old friends and exhibit their lives (photos, groups, networks, friends, notes, links etc.), thus furthering the operations of a small community.
For those that have heard of MySpace and passed on signing up because of the ‘mickey-mouse-ness’ stigma associated with it, Facebook appears to be the logical successor which has allowed more mainstream adoption.
A perfect example is how ICQ (IM technology) changed the landscape and paved the way for peer-2-peer which first rocked the social world (kinda) with Napster. I remember being one of the first hundred thousand ICQ users while in my first year of university (I miss early un-capped network speeds). ICQ blew up quickly due to college and university networks. It was the coolest and quickest means to communicate outside of email and by 2nd year university, if you had a computer, you had ICQ on it.
ICQ, like Myspace, was simply a first flavorful iteration of technology integrated social communities.
ICQ was adopted by early technology savvy college populations, then to the masses via MSN/Yahoo. Myspace, was adopted early on by less of a technology savvy and more of a community hungry population (high school to college).
Facebook is purely for anyone and everyone that has the internet and a willing to share and reconnect at will.
Looking at your example of Boston vs. San Francisco, as well as having spent time in both cities with my college friends, I accept and understand the current and wide adoption rate difference between the two. To sum it up on a very general level (via my observations), Boston is mainly driven by the college masses, which allows for a healthier adoption rate than sunny San Fran, where people have much better things to do than spend time in front of Facebook.
I don’t think smaller communities will be the ‘best prepared’ for a future that will be heavily based on social media and interactions, but I definitely see them better aligned to make use of and adopt it because of the nature of their small community. It’s all about the fit, and smaller communities are tighter by nature than urban folks that are more spread out and have less of that tight and frequent community interaction.
So far these statistics are extremely interesting and will be even more interesting in the next 6, 12 months. Future stats will reveal more to the story than we all have been hypothesizing about.
Cheers Scott
April 25th, 2007 at 8:26 am
[...] UPDATE: Scott Brooks [posts even more evidence]!(http://www.thoughtballoons.net/?p=115) St. John, NB 25%? [...]
November 13th, 2007 at 3:10 pm
Hey Ryan, this is an older post I found doing a google search. The reason why St. John New Brunswick has so many people on its network is because there is no network for neighboring Moncton which actually boasts a larger population within its tri-city area than St. John does. Many people from Moncton use St. John as their network, which is still a significant number for a small place, but is over-reflected if you think its just traffic from St. John (which by the way, smells like an arm pit).
April 28th, 2008 at 4:43 pm
[...] Canada is all  FaceBook! Big time. [...]
September 19th, 2008 at 11:09 am
I would love to see this updated … I may have to find some time to dig about some Canadian stats myself
Karrine
Her-media.com
February 21st, 2010 at 11:17 pm
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