Most Pinoy Facebook users are overseas?

Surprising new data seems to indicate that Filipinos, despite having the fifth largest Facebook population in the world, seem to be accessing the site from outside the country —or at least are playing things safe online.

Social media metrics company Socialbakers.com recently launched Facebook city statistics as part of its monitoring service, adding a higher level of granularity to its continued monitoring of Facebook statistics per country.

"Besides monitoring Facebook users on continents and in all countries around the world, we have decided to take this monitoring one step further and monitor Facebook users in selected world cities as well," Facebakers said on its blog.

Yet, despite being the eleventh largest city in the world and the capital of the fifth dominant country on Facebook, Manila does not figure anywhere on the Socialbakers list. Nor does any other Philippine city.

Overseas —or just cautious?

These surprising statistics seem to indicate that the majority of Filipinos who use Facebook are located overseas —or at least have not indicated their current city or hometown in their Facebook profiles.

Although Facebook allows users to post information about their location to their public profiles, these details are not required to join the social networking site.

In fact, the Philippine National Police (PNP) last year warned parents to monitor their kids' Facebook usage, urging users of the social networking site to limit the amount of personal information that they post online.

Manila didn't make it

Over the past year, Socialbakers statistics have charted the meteoric rise of the Philippines into Facebook's fifth largest user worldwide, with over 22.6 million registered Filipino Facebook users to date.

However, the release of city-specific data from Socialbakers shows a surprising development: none of the Philippines' cities —not even Manila, the country's capital and the eleventh most populous city in the world, according to Worldatlas.com— made it to the entire list of 120 cities.

Not surprisingly, ten of the 20 largest cities in the world can be found on the list. These include Jakarta, Indonesia (Rank 1 on Socialbakers); Mexico City, Mexico (3); London, the UK (4); Buenos Aires, Argentina (6); New York City, USA (14); Sao Paolo, Brazil (15); Los Angeles, USA (17); Mumbai, India (18); Delhi, India (36); and Calcutta, India (79).

Alternatives to Facebook

Other countries not on the Socialbakers list —including Tokyo, Japan, and Seoul, South Korea, the world's most populous cities— can be accounted for as having their own alternative social networks to Facebook.

Japan, for instance, uses Mixi, while South Korea employs Cyworld. China, for its part, has QQ Zone, and Russia has VKontakte.

On the other hand, the United States —which boasts the largest number of Facebook users in the world— has 21 cities on the Socialbakers list. Indonesia, the second largest country on Facebook, has three cities on the list. Third- and fourth-placers the UK and Turkey have four and five cities on the list, respectively. — GMA News

Facebook CEO's former house is for rent

Here's an interesting post about renting Facebook CEO's former house:
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Feel like snooping around Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's house?

Well, now you can do it legally: The house that the social-networking boy wonder was renting near the Stanford University campus in Palo Alto, Calif., is back on the market for the low, low price of $7,850 a month.
An ad on Craigslist boasts that the "gorgeous" four-bedroom, three-bath single-family home is in a "Prestigious location!" with "Charm and functionality!" It features a chef's kitchen with gas stove, a wood-burning fireplace and a huge family room "with the view of Kitchen." (That must be some kitchen!)
There was some confusion on Thursday about whether or not the house had already been leased but the owner of the property, Stan Wu, confirmed that the house, located at 2073 Princeton Street, is available. He wouldn't confirm that Zuckerberg was his most recent tenant, though it is well documented that the home was rented by Zuckerberg for the past few years. (He recently gave Oprah a tour.)
A newly renovated home like this is a rarity in this college town, known for its old homes that are split up and rented by several students at a time.
Realtor Anne Arjani with Keller Williams said $7,850 a month sounds a little high - most homes this size rent for around $5,000. Still, she said, it's conceivable the owner could get that much, given the size and prestige of Stanford - and all the wealth floating around in Silicon Valley.
The fact that the home had a famous former resident could make it even more attractive to some buyers.
"For some people, that could ring their bells," Arjani said.
She said some clients would look at it as good feng shui, or Vastu Shastra, as it's called in the Hindu culture.
"They think, ‘This was a prosperous place for someone so it could be a prosperous place for me,'" she said.
So far it hasn't been good luck for the owner: The property is currently worth about $1.4 million, according to Zillow, down from $1.9 million when Zuckerberg moved in.
Call him the half-a-million-dollar man - and not in a good way.
Though, I don't suppose he loses any sleep over it: He created the second-most visited site on the Internet (behind Google) and has an estimated net worth of $6.9 billion, earning him the No. 35 spot on Forbes' list of the richest people in America.
Funny, for all the privacy violations he's been accused of, his own privacy seems to be very closely guarded. The owner of the property treated him like Lord Voldemort, refusing to even mention his name, and instead delivered one of the most boring interviews in the history of interviews, mumbling about the "expensive area" and "square footage," before lamely asking to be excused from the conversation like a boy who finished his supper and wanted to go outside and play.
And, while most real-estate agents are usually a raging sewer of self-promotion and salesmanship, even Arjani hurriedly hung up the phone the first time after the mention of Zuckerberg's name. Only on the second call, when the conversation was focused solely on the local real-estate market did she open up. And Gawker points out that the "street view" image of the home has been taken down from Google Maps.
Of course, all that secrecy just makes you want to snoop around even more, doesn't it? See if maybe he left behind a phone bill. A to-do list scrawled on a crumpled post-it note. A love note to his girlfriend, who also lived there. Anything, really, that would make you feel like somehow you invaded his privacy - even just a little bit.

via yahoo!