UK Facebook users soar to 3.5m

Facebook has enjoyed huge growth in popularity in the past six months and now has more than 3.5 million users in the UK.
Londoners make up the social networking website's second largest regional user group worldwide, with around 450,000 in the capital.
Figures compiled by comScore for MediaGuardian.co.uk showed a steady increase in UK unique users up to just over 500,000 in October 2006.
But since then UK user numbers have rocketed, to 1.35 million in December and 2.67 million in March.
By the end of April, comScore estimates Facebook was being used by an estimated 3.69 million people in the UK.
The figures record a year-on-year traffic growth of 1,617%, but still put Facebook behind MySpace, Bebo, Windows Live Spaces, Blogger and Piczo in terms of UK social networking websites.
Facebook's audience share among the top 10 UK social networking sites is around 16%, compared with MySpace's 43%.
The website estimates that 1.4 million of its UK users are "active", defined as someone that uses that site at least once a month. Globally, Facebook has 23 million active users.
"We've seen phenomenal growth in the United Kingdom over the past few months," said Matt Hicks, the senior manager of corporate communications for Facebook.
"I wouldn't be able to pinpoint a specific reason for the recent growth in the UK, other than our overall pattern of growing exponentially. We're growing at a rate of 3% a week."
Mr Hicks said that Facebook's network of London users was accessed by 450,000 people.
Strong international growth this year has been driven by English-speaking countries, with the UK third behind the US and Canada.
Growth has also been strong in Norway, Australia, South Africa, Lebanon, Egypt, Sweden and India.
Facebook this week stated that its users have uploaded 1.7bn photos - with more than 60m added each week.
"While still small compared to MySpace, Facebook is showing phenomenal growth numbers," said Bob Ivins, the comScore executive vice-president and managing director for Europe.
"What we see is that sites in this space get to a tipping point and create a virtuous cycle, so the larger they grow the more people that want to check it out.
"And the more people that check it out by visiting the larger they grow - and so on. It looks like Facebook is getting to that point," Mr Ivins added.

This article is taken from guardian.co.uk