London Beats Out Toronto as Top Facebook Town
Smug Torontonian social media enthusiasts have reason to curse the digital gods today, as our fair city has slipped behind London, England as the Facebook network with the most members. Not only does this damage our credibility as a wired city, but also likely feeds into some vestigial colonial inferiority complex.
Toronto's second place status was first reported in the Guardian. Apparently, London overtook TO sometime last week. As of 11:30AM this morning, London had 798,165 members, and Toronto only 702,719.
"We aren't able to pinpoint a specific reason for the rapid growth in one regional network over another, other than the fact it matches our overall pattern of growing exponentially," said Facebook rep Matt Hicks in the Guardian.
Of course, granting London the 'biggest network' title based on number of members isn't exactly fair. As a proportion of population, Toronto still rules the Facebook roost- 28.3 per cent of Torontonians are members, as opposed to only 11.1 per cent of Londoners (based on 2001 census data). I'm not quite sure how to interpret this data. Either we're super plugged into emerging digital trends, or have a city-wide aversion to face-to-face contact. So chin up, Toronto! We may be in the midst of a budget crunch, but a fanatically high proportion of our city is posting on walls and poking itself online.
Comments (7)
Face to face contact? People still do that? I'm all about some Facebook to Facebook contact. =)
Absolute numbers are one thing but the rate of Facebook subscribers per thousand persons is the real indicator of the concentration of subscribers.
The Toronto network has a lot of people who don't live in the 416 and just subscribe to it because the only regional network below Barrie, east of Kingston and west of Hamilton is Toronto. So maybe it would be more appropriate if we used the GTA population rather than the number of Torontonians to calculate the rate of Facebook participation. That being said, there is a large percentage of people on Facebook in Toronto who only belong to their school's network or no network at all.
Michael Coren has a Facebook page. It's apparently a fan club.
There goes Coren, pandering like there's no tomorrow and, just like evangelists, only to the converted














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