I'm really displeased with the comparison to a country. Saying something about the percentage of people in the world that have signed up, or the growth rate is okay, but the choice of where to live is pretty substantial compared to signing up for a website. It's not like other countries are losing citizens when somebody signs up for Facebook, and it's not like people are spending their entire lives on/in Facebook either.

Another intellectually dishonest number I hear Facebook recite is the number of developers. They get this number from the number of people who have installed the developer application. In the first year of the platform, that was 400,000. I know numerous friends who know nothing about programming that installed the developer application in that first week because they didn't know what they were doing. They recite this figure as if hundreds of thousands of people have devoted their lives to making Facebook applications. Sorry to burst someone's bubble, but it just ain't so.