Facebook stats for Ireland - 131,660 Ireland based people on it now?
From location Ireland we get the below stats. Remember too that these are stats on what people …
Context & Ripple Effects
Back in May 2007, VentureBeat asked whether Facebook's growth spurt would leave more roadkill behind it; by mid-October the platform had settled with New York AG Andrew Cuomo over safety complaints, power user Robert Scoble had hit the 5,000-friend cap, and analysts were arguing its popularity runs on self-fulfilling network effects. Damien Mulley's post adds a grassroots measurement to that arc: a country-level headcount of 131,660 Ireland-based members, pulled from Facebook's own location filters.
The number is only publicly checkable because Facebook this month opened its Application Directory and app 'about' pages to non-logged-in visitors and to search-engine indexing — the same opening that lets outsiders audit growth market by market instead of waiting for company announcements.
First-order effects
- Irish advertisers and application developers get their first concrete sizing of the local market — 131,660 users — at the moment Facebook's app pages become crawlable by Google and viewable without an account.
- Application developers gain a search-visible storefront: app 'about' pages now rank in general web search, extending discovery beyond Facebook's internal channels.
Second-order effects
- With app pages indexed, some developer acquisition effort shifts toward search visibility alongside in-network virality, making Google an indirect distribution channel for the Facebook platform.
- Traditional webmail providers, whose turf Facebook's growth was already reported to be encroaching on as of October 18, now compete against a network whose regional penetration is becoming publicly measurable.
Third-order effects
- If country-level counts become routine public benchmarks, social-network competition shifts toward auditable regional penetration — though the same month's commentary cautions that network effects make such popularity partly self-sustaining regardless of product merit.
- The measurement outruns the business model: the corpus records that Web 2.0 companies including Facebook, YouTube, and Digg had yet to make substantial real money despite their audiences, so growth metrics and revenue remain decoupled.
The trend: Social networks are cracking open closed membership and application data to search engines, turning per-country user counts into public competitive benchmarks as international growth accelerates.