And as if by magic, here's another really useful infographic outlining the dominant social networking sites around the world.

However, please approach with caution...

While the analogy works insomuch as illustrating the geographic and, therefore, culturally diverse community that Facebook has helped connect, the world's largest social network by volume of user accounts is actually QQ in China (but only just). QQ is an information portal a bit like Yahoo! and offers a chat service called QQZone that's similar to Yahoo! Messenger or MSN Messenger, but users are able to upload files, images, videos, and profile information. This classifies QZone as a social network (in my book at least).

Earlier this year, in reading a financial report published by QQ's owners, Tencent (a listed company on the Hong Kong stock exchange), I read that QQZone has around 640million registered user accounts. This is marginally (in % terms) bigger than Facebook's user base, and of course much less diverse (the service is created for native Chinese speakers; both the user experience and user interface reflect this.).

It's a bit disappointing to see Techcrunch cover this story purely from a Facebook angle, but I guess that shows the western bias.

More on China to come in Q1 next year. Watch this space.