Facebook Is Still Going Strong

Don't believe the rumours that Facebook is about to drop off the face of the Internet. While Britain did have a drop in users in January, it still retains 8.5 million devotees. Canada is still going strong, too.

In Canada there were about 20,000 less viewers but that isn't a worry at this point for the networking site. A single month of decline is to be taken with a grain of salt says comScore Senior Analyst Andrew Lipsman.

"Any one-month decline -- I'd always just take that with a grain of salt," Lipsman told CTV.ca on Thursday, noting two out of every three Canadian Internet users have a Facebook account.

Since 2006 when Facebook opened the doors for Canadians they have been flooding the gates. In January 2007 the site had 3.3 million users. In 2008, a year later that number had risen to 15.3 million checking out the social scene. Even if Facebook's new user market starts to slip they could still be around for a long time. By expanding the services for their existing members and keeping the site fresh they will be able to stay in the running. Some experts think that one way to keep things fresh is to have more information being able to be shared among the other user-based websites. The one concern with that goal though is keeping security at the forefront.

"Facebook is it for the near future, but things change pretty quickly," social networking expert Charlene Li said. "We're going to look back in five years time and think it was so silly for us to have to go to a site like Facebook to be social with our friends."