Facebook is all about women talking!  That is the basic findings of a blogger called Paul Francis, who has just build a dataset of users in different countries.

It seems that on average, Facebook is 2/3 women and very much an English language tool.  In the UK, there are almost 7,000,000 users.  2.4 million, of 35% are men, the other 4.4 million are obviously women.

Here are the full figures.

The analysis is more muddled though due to a number of issues.  Firstly, this is a very popular service, and as such suffers from spam.  It also isn’t possible to register the regularity of the users or even the number of accounts they have.  This is a problem for a number of websites where people register, use it once, and never reconnect.  This is sometimes known as the second life effect!

There is also the issue of the value of these users.  MySpace has already established itself as a place for music fans.  Facebook seems to be a place for the media.  The BBC itself has over 14,000 registered users.  Combined with the original user base being university students, this makes the value of the Facebook audience limited.  If, however, your business core audience was students, or TV types, and esspecially females, you could be on to something here!

For the rest of us, we’ll still have to wait to find the ideal business networking tool – although it is something the Flintshire ICT advisory service is slowly working on!

Originally posted 2007-11-23 15:57:53.