I have a good friend named Arieh. He recently made a very cool post over at OneDegree.ca about Facebook’s market penetration in Toronto. In his article, Arieh references a recent blog post Rannie made on the topic:

“Today I found out how many people are in the (facebook) Toronto
Network. That number is 483,887 people (plus a bunch that don’t even
have themselves listed in a geographic network).
When you compare that to all of California which includes 19 networks
(LA, San Francisco, San Diego etc) 341 433 people. NYC (202 600 people)”

Torontonian bloggers have jumped on this stat as proof that Toronto is a more “socially aware” community.

Although I love Toronto (I live there!), I have an issue with this conclusion. Causation does not imply correlation! Let me elaborate:

There are more Orkut (another social networking website) users in San Paolo, Brazil than there are in all of Canada. Does that mean San Paolo is more socially aware than Toronto? No - it just means Brazilians prefer Orkut.

Similarly, Americans prefer Myspace. Americans also spell colour without a u. Torontonians are supposed to spell colour with a u, and also seem to prefer Facebook.

So, the real question we should be discussing then is, why do Torontonians prefer Facebook?

I think it is as combination of the student population of Toronto
and Toronto being the business centre of Canada. U of T has ~60,000
students. Ryerson has ~28,000, York has ~50,000. There are also large
number of students at George Brown, Seneca, Sentential, Sheridan, and
Toronto’s many other post-secondary institutions.

When these students graduate, I reckon the majority of them stay in
Toronto, as thats where most of the Jobs in Canada are. Because these
people used Facebook in Toronto-based schools, and their geography
hasn’t really changed, they continue to stay in the same Facebook
networks after graduation. After sufficient time the network effect
comes into play, the end result being Toronto’s Facebook community
becoming one of the largest in the world.

As an interesting side note, here is an article with an opinion as to why Brazil Loves Orkut.