[LINK] More on Facebook and Canada

[rfmcdonald]

Yes, Canada is nearly to Facebook what Orkut is to Brazil.

More than a million Torontonians made friends with Facebook in 2007, contributing to the "phenomenal growth" in Canadian users last year.

Toronto was the first city in North America to break 1 million subscribers, a recent study shows.

Now roughly half of Canadian web users have Facebook accounts, according to a report released yesterday by ZINC Research and Dufferin Research.

The national ongoing research study showed that the rate of Canadians subscribing to Facebook doubled in the past three months.

"Two thousand and seven is the year that Facebook took Canada by storm," said Brian Singh, managing director of ZINC Research.

In just over a year, Facebook racked up more than 7 million Canadian subscribers, who are among more than 58 million users worldwide, said Singh.

The ZINC research report is available here (PDF format).

Against this cheeriness, Ivor Tossell in today's The Globe and Mail suggests that privacy issues concerning Facebook's access to and use of personal information might take away Facebook's gleam.

Our online behaviour, which is being tracked so closely by so many eyes, betrays the real us. Privacy isn't defined by the things we say about ourselves on profile pages; it's defined by the things we do online. Volunteering to publicize that information, like Facebook did, is a land mine other companies will be careful not to trod on in the future.

It's hard to say how long Facebook will hang on. Offline businesses take decades to achieve global dominance and years more to lapse into decline. On the Web, a brand can be unheard-of in February and have half the country signed up by Christmas, but it works the other way too. Facebook has already started to bungle the strengths that made it big to begin with: Its annoying user-generated applications have cut into the elegance that originally made it respectable, and the debacle over its advertising program tarnished the goodwill that binds fickle Netizens. The company doesn't seem to have the ability to stay on top of the market it's created, and sooner than later, a competitor will arrive to capitalize on these mistakes.

In 2008, it seems a fair bet that some new online proposition will come rocketing out of left field, sign up a few dozen million users and stake an entirely legitimate claim to being the next big thing. Facebook will soldier on, looking for less offensive ways to make money and trying to look like it's enjoying life as last year's belle of the ball. It can take solace in the fact that Miss Internet Hoopla 2008 will have some very high heels to fill.