Facebook nears 700 million users worldwide

After reaching 500 million last summer and 600 million a few months ago, the social network chugs on

If you want to know how many users Facebook has and if you do your research by typing “facebook statistics” into Google, you’ll learn that the site has “more than 500 million active users.”

But most of us know that stat hasn’t been updated since last July, when the site surpassed the half billion mark.

Facebook is now closing in on 700 million users, according to Socialbakers, one of the largest Facebook statistics portals. At this rate, the site could be on track to attain a quarter of a billion users in only another year. By 2012, could the world’s largest social networking site be the first ever Web platform with a billion active users?

Increasingly, it’s seeming likely. After all, it was only a few months ago that Facebook reported to its newest investors that the site already had more than 600 million users.

Unfortunately for the international competition, not all of Facebook’s new users are necessarily new to social networking.

Socialbakers says Facebook is seeing the most growth in Brazil, which added 1.9 million users last month, growth of 11.4 percent. The site added just over 900,000 users in India last month, representing growth of 3.7 percent. Both data points are significant because Orkut, a Google-owned social network, has a prominent presence in both Brazil and India, and had done a pretty good job of stunting Facebook growth in those countries. As its social graph gradually inflates, however, Facebook will only become more and more attractive to users in those countries.

Other fast-growing countries include Indonesia, the Philippines, Mexico and Argentina, each with over a million new users last month. At the bottom of the top ten list are Colombia, Egypt, Turkey and the United Kingdom.

Besides Brazil, the only other country with double-digit percentage growth is Egypt, which added nearly 800,000 users for an 11.1 percent increase.

In the end, no matter where the new users are coming from, Facebook’s rapid growth is nothing short of astonishing. Even more impressive, the social network’s users are incredibly active: by the summer, the site will be hosting over 100 billion photos. That’s quite an investment from the user’s perspective; those users aren’t going to any new social sites anytime soon.