The juggernaut that is Facebook is quickly approaching 1 billion users, so the social arrangement is on the rise at a rapid pace overall.

But if we look at some of the latest figures available, it would seem that Zuckerberg’s creation is not gaining users in every corner of the world.

In fact, in one public, Facebook has lost 16% of its users over the last six months, the equivalent of over 200,000 users. But in another public, Facebook has gained nearly 17 million users over the same period.

What countries are we talking in this area, you question? Read on and we’ll tell you.

Facebook winners

Brazil is the winner, by far, when it comes to amassing Facebook users, but in relative terms there are many additional winners, as well. Here are the top 10 countries where Facebook has gained most users over the last six months:

As you can see, nearly 17 million Brazilians have joined Facebook over the last six months. That’s an impressive number even when you look at the percentage – it represents a growth of 54.37%. There are countries that have grown more than Brazil in relative terms, like Japan, but not one is even close to the populace size of Brazil.

Facebook losers

Then we flip the list and look at the ten countries that have lost the most users over the last six months. Suddenly, Puerto Rico is in the number one spot, shedding 232,980 users, followed by Venezuela, which saw a decline of 86,560 users over the same period.

But when we look at what relative size of the decline this represents, Puerto Rico is no longer in the lead, so to speak. That honor goes instead to Turkmenistan, which lost 34.82% of its Facebook users over the past six months. But even for Puerto Rico, the percentage loss is rather steep at 16.06%.

Facebook penetration around the world

While knowing how many public are using Facebook in countries around the world is fascinating, it’s also valuable to see where the potential for growth is.

In additional words, what percentage of the populace in a particular public or region is using Facebook, and where the largest potential growth is. Here’s what the current situation looks like for Facebook:

Clearly, the region where Facebook stands the most to gain, at least in terms of users, is Asia, where nearly 217 million Facebook users represent only 5.6% of the populace.

Obviously Africa stands out in addition to Asia, with only 4.28% Facebook penetration, but the populace is also smaller (around 25% of the populace of Asia). In addition, Internet penetration in Africa also lags behind Asia.

Conclusion

As Facebook is getting ready for its IPO, these are numbers that are probably studied in fantastic detail by potential investors around the world. It seems evident that Facebook desires an expansion plot that involves all corners of the world, but that focuses on certain regions, like Africa and Asia.

We noted last year that despite 80% of Facebook users by now being outside the U.S., the number of users that could be added to Facebook in populace-rich Africa and Asia is giant.

Throw into the mix that China still blocks Facebook, and the possible future paths for Facebook look even more fascinating.

Note: We used Socialbakers as the data source for this article.

This was a post from the guys at Pingdom, a site monitoring service that makes sure you’re the initially to know when your site is down. Check it out for free.

From:
Top 10 Facebook winners and losers (countries)

Developers who want a portable computer to code on, which is thin, light, sleek and yet powerful, may now be getting another option in an ultrabook from Dell. What makes the “Sputnik” ultrabook different is that it runs Ubuntu 12.04 Linux and it’s tailor-made for developers.

Every Friday we bring you a collection of links to places on the web that we find particularly newsworthy, fascinating, entertaining, and topical. We try to focus on some particular area or topic each week, but in general we will cover Internet, web development, networking, performance, wellbeing, and additional geeky topics.

This week’s suggested reading in this area Dell’s Ubuntu developer ultrabook

Introducing Project Sputnik: Developer laptop :: Barton’s Blog

To place it in perspective, Sputnik is part of an effort by Dell to better know and serve the desires of developers in Web companies. We want to finds ways to make the developer experience as powerful and simple as possible. And what better way to do that than beginning with a laptop that is both highly mobile and extremely stylish, running the 12.04 LTS release of Ubuntu Linux.

Could be alternative to MacBook Air.

Dell plots Ubuntu laptop for developers with eye on OpenStack cloud :: InfoWorld

One of Dell’s visions for Project Sputnik is to enable developers to download premade, ready-to-use developer environments — effectively profiles with all the necessary tools for coding in various languages. “If you wanted the Ruby profile for developing in Ruby, or Android, or JavaScript, you could go and take those packages down and use them on your system,” George said in the Dell Vlog.

Sounds like a very cool thought.

Dell puts Sputnik open-source laptop on launch pad :: The Register

Dell is crafting a tool with coders that connects to a GitHub repository and pulls down “developer profiles” – a toolchain configuration built to suit a particular type of work – the initially of which are targeting Android, Ruby and JavaScript development. After these Dell desires the community to build profiles of their own and it’s inviting feedback at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Oakland, California, this week.

Project Sputnik: Developer Focused Dell XPS13 :: Dustin Kirkland

I’m absolutely thrilled to have been invited by Barton George to participate in Dell’s Project Sputnik! As of this morning, the gag order has been lifted and I can finally publicly blog in this area it I’m writing this blog post from a groundbreaking new Dell XPS13, given to me by Dell! Project Sputnik is a new endeavor from Dell to produce a portable hardware and software platform specifically designed for developers. Have you been to a conference recently where the predominant hacker platform involved a legion of Mac Airs running OSX? Well, I reckon we finally have a contender

He has one by now, they lucky…

Dell tests open-source laptop for developers :: GigaOM

What is it that web developers want? That’s what Dell is trying to find out with its just-launched Project Sputnik, an “experimental” laptop bundled with Ubuntu Linux plus utilities, and with an simple on-ramp to github repositories coming soon. Sputnik looks like Dell’s have a crack to wrest the attention of the many web developers that have defected to OS X, but chafe at the restrictions Apple’s walled garden imposes on them.

But it won’t have the cute apple on the outside

And finally, make sure you take a look at this: “I don’t know. It just feels… different.” It might just clarify everything!

You can also subscribe to these articles

You can also subscribe to these weekly articles and receive them in your email inbox each week.

Sign up here!

This was a post from the guys at Pingdom, a site monitoring service that makes sure you’re the initially to know when your site is down. Check it out for free.

From:
Dell’s Ubuntu developer ultrabook – Weekend must-read articles #15

“Photograph what is close to you. Share it with the world!“ That’s one of the headlines on Aday.org, a global project that will have a crack to document what goes around the world in one day.

This all takes house on Tuesday May 15, 2012, and Pingdom will be participating.

Besides showing our support for this very worthwhile – and non-profit – effort, we want to document a day in the life of Pingdom and its employees.

We’re all geeks here at Pingdom, so we get excited in this area any cool thought where we can use technology and Aday.org certainly is one such project.

From morning to evening, on May 15, we will take photos of all different aspects of what the geeks at Pingdom are up to. This could be having breakfast, going to work, writing code, having a meeting, design something, and anything and everything in between.

You will find our photos on the Aday website, of course. There is a 10-picture limit for how many you can upload (and you really have a week to upload them, so you don’t necessarily have to do it on the 15^th), so we felt like we would also document our day at aday.pingdom.com.

Why don’t you join in, as well? Just sign up for a free account, charge up your camera batteries and empty the flash cards. May 15, here we come!

This was a post from the guys at Pingdom, a site monitoring service that makes sure you’re the initially to know when your site is down. Check it out for free.

From:
A day in the life of Pingdom – join us May 15

We’re looking for guest bloggers for this blog, and you could be one of them.

If you follow the Royal Pingdom blog, you know we like cool and geeky stuff, like what’s experience with the Internet, web, performance, gadgets, and more.

Do you reckon you could contribute one or more articles to the Royal Pingdom blog?

We’re looking for top-notch quality content that is informative, analytical, engaging, amusing, inquisitive, and, of course, of interest to our readers.

If you reckon you’ve got what it takes, send us an email, with some details in this area yourself, and what you’d like to write in this area.

If we feel that you could be a match for what we’re looking for, we’ll be in touch.

To get ahead of the question of whether we acknowledge guest posts from companies writing in this area their services, we can simply say we’re not hostile to it. But it should be of interest to our readership, and it should not be just a sales pitch for your stuff.

We’ll post this to the Pingdom Blog as well.

Image (top) via Shutterstock.

This was a post from the guys at Pingdom, a site monitoring service that makes sure you’re the initially to know when your site is down. Check it out for free.

From:
Pingdom is looking for guest bloggers

In our continuing run of interviews in this area web performance, we’re now joined by Yannick Kunegel, Manager, Systems Engineering – Eastern Europe, Middle East, and Africa at Citrix Systems.

Citrix may not be the company that comes initially to your mind when thinking in this area web performance or web companies. But if you look at its wide range of products and services, you’ll see that they do care very deeply in this area the web and how quick web services are for users.

Pingdom: Why is web performance such a hot topic right now?

Yannick: Poor web performance impacts customers’ experience, resulting in increased page abandonment and, as a result, potential loss of revenue and customer loyalty. While web and mobile sites have evolved in recent years with the latest technology to engage customers or drive sales, it is increasingly critical to grant quick and reliable site performance to ensure that websites always deliver to their audience.

Pingdom: There’s a lot of evidence that web users tend to leave a website if it loads slowly. Are users getting more demanding and impatient, or are there additional reasons behind this?

Yannick: As public get more and more used to surfing on the Internet, their expectations of quicker response times continues to grow. Benchmarks are typically being set by Internet leaders like Google, eBay, Amazon, Yahoo, companies that leverage web hastening solutions to deliver an increasingly speedy service to users. And their investment pays off, as research from the Aberdeen Group found recently. A research showed that the average impact of a 1-second delay meant a 7% reduction in conversions to sales for an online store. For an e-commerce site earning $100,000 per day, a one-second delay can mean up to $2.5 million in lost revenues over the course of a year.

Pingdom: Web performance involves a lot of testing and numbers. But at the end of the day, isn’t a user’s experience a personal and subjective experience? How do you reconcile the two?

Yannick: The best approach would be to benchmark performance and conduct a assessment across different user groups. Compare the two and use the median as the targeted response time to gain a excellent balance. The challenge, though, is then to maintain a regular performance even during peak connection times, which is exactly where networking solutions such as Citrix NetScaler play a fundamental role by offering the required level of scalability.

Pingdom: Could, at least part of, the answer to improved web performance for end users be tighter integration between the components involved, like hardware, software, networking, etc.?

Yannick: Yes, absolutely. We would typically look into leveraging mechanisms such as TCP protocol optimization, content caching, data compression, load balancing of multiple Web servers or SSL offloading to improve web performance for users.

Pingdom: What’s the relationship between web performance and scalability?  

Yannick: Web performance is the raw speed of your application for a single user, for example, the time it takes for a single application-level operation. Scalability is commonly understood as the measurement of resiliency under an ever-increasing user load. Though these are two different concepts, their purpose is interwoven as we look at how many users can be served by the existing web infrastructure within acceptable performance parameters.

Pingdom: Best practice in mobile web performance isn’t as well established as in additional fields like desktop. Are we getting closer to a sort of universal agreement or understanding of performance in the mobile space as well?

Yannick: The go to mobile is inevitable as both consumer and enterprise technologies venture into the mobile space. Growth of the mobile web installed base should stimulate further growth of mobile commerce. Expectations from mobile performance are ambitious. Although there are many more moving parts, bandwidth constraints and device limitations in the mobile application delivery chain, consumers often have the same expectations in terms of performance from the mobile Internet as from the connected desktop.  While rich content is available in more and more websites, most carriers are looking at ways to optimize content delivery to reduce data consumption, and strive to maintain quality of service under different arrangement conditions.

Pingdom: For a name who is going to start effective with their website and performance, where do you suggest they start? What should they do initially?

Yannick: The focus should start on enabling the infrastructure that will ultimately support the website front end. We firstly urge consulting a specialized organization such as Citrix on how to design a web infrastructure that will help them meet the level of wellbeing and performance they require from their website.

Pingdom: With everyone talking in this area cloud, it seems to be everywhere. What’s your view on cloud and web performance?

Yannick: Public are driving cloud adoption with their increasing need for flexibility and mobility in the management of time between work and leisure. Companies that know this on the rise trend and the desires of their employees will need to align their applications and content development solutions with this in mind. Some of the largest websites are by now hosted by public cloud providers, and this delivers further proof that cloud and web performance are compatible in the long run.

Pingdom: What are we going to see happen in the next few years in terms of web performance?

Yannick: Consumerization of IT is the one of the largest trends we can expect to see emerge in the next few years and this is just the tip of the iceberg. The mobile platform will drive a massive increase in traffic, which ultimately will impact the scalability and agility for web performance and compel organizations to design and strengthen their web infrastructure accordingly.

Pingdom: Finally, is there something exciting that you or your company is effective on in terms of web performance that you can tell us in this area?

Yannick: As IT managers transform their traditional datacenters into enterprise clouds, bringing the infrastructure in line with the new trends in the market, they need real solutions that scale performance on-demand for cloud-like elasticity. These solutions enable businesses to expand capacity seamlessly to meet application traffic growth, as well as consolidate core arrangement capabilities like load balancing, wellbeing and hastening for all datacenter applications into a single platform.

Citrix has released TriScale technology to address these desires for enterprises and service providers that need multiple methods for scaling their arrangement. With the TriScale technology, organizations of all types, sizes, and levels of cloud maturity can, for example, make the arrangement elastic with 5x quicker performance on-demand, replacing fixed-capacity appliances with flexible, software-based Pay-As-You-Grow licensing; seamlessly expand capacity up to 32x with advanced clustering technology and scale the number of applications and/or business units (supported by consolidating up to 40 NetScaler app delivery policies into just one NetScaler SDX platform).

In this area Yannick Kunegel

Yannick Kunegel is Citrix’s Regional Manager, Systems Engineering, for Middle-East & Africa. In his role he leads a team of Citrix Solution consultants who help organizations evaluate, test and design virtualization solutions. He has more than 15 years experience in IT across Europe and Middle East, with expertise ranging from desktop virtualization to high performance computing and storage from his Silicon Graphics days. Yannick has a Master Degree in Computer Science from the University of Nancy, France.

In this area the “10 questions in this area web performance” interview run

We have gathered some of the best and brightest minds in the web and IT industry to a conversation in this area web performance. Over the next few weeks and months, we’ll be rolling out a run of interviews, bringing together public from web design, mobile and computer hardware, web hosting, software, and additional areas. You can find all the interviews in this run on the Royal Pingdom blog.

This was a post from the guys at Pingdom, a site monitoring service that makes sure you’re the initially to know when your site is down. Check it out for free.

From:
10 questions in this area web performance – Yannick Kunegel at Citrix