The global rise of Facebook is nothing less than astounding. In the month of June alone it gained 24 million unique visitors worldwide, compared to the month before, for a total of 340 million unique visitors worldwide.  It is now the fourth largest site in the world, trailing only Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo sites, according to comScore (see table below). Facebook itself only officially acknowledges 250 million active registered users (but you don’t have to be a registered user to visit some Facebook pages).

In the past year, it has grown 157 percent, gaining 208 million visitors.  It long ago passed its rival MySpace on a global basis, way back in April, 2008. Since then, it has passing even bigger sites on its way up. In the chart above, the blue line is Facebook. It passed Amazon back in August, 2008. eBay fell by the wayside in January, 2009. It surged past AOL sometime in February, 2009, and just last month it finally passed the Wikimedia Foundation sites (which includes Wikipedia).

So there it stands at No. 4. It will be a while, if ever, before it catches up to the three world leaders: Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo. They each have between 240 million and 500 million more monthly global unique visitors than Facebook (see chart below). But it’s always good for a company to have stretch goals.

Worldwide unique visitors (June, 2009).  Source: comScore

1. Google Sites: 844 million
2. Microsoft Sites: 691 million
3. Yahoo! Sites: 581 million
4. Facebook: 340 million
5. Wikimedia Foundation sites: 303 million
6. AOL: 280 million
7. eBay: 233 million
8. CBS Interactive: 186 million
9. Amazon: 183 million
10. Ask Network: 174 million

In the U.S., Facebook had 77 million unique visitors in the month of June, making it the sixth largest site in the U.S. (after Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL and all Fox Interactive Media sites combined).

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France Telecom’s Orange, one of the biggest mobile phone operators in Europe, has partnered with Wikimedia to provide Wikipedia content through co-branded channels on Orange’s mobile phones and web sites. Through a revenue-sharing arrangement, the non-profit Wikimedia foundation will get a cut of some of the advertising dollars (or Euros) generated by its content.

Orange will create specific Wikipedia content channels on Orange’s web and mobile portals. Orange will also develop widgets to help customers access Wikipedia content directly from Orange’s portals. Initially, the Wikipedia content and widgets will only be provided to customers in France, Spain, the UK, and Poland but will be rolled out to the rest of Orange’s European footprint at a later point.

It seems like a good deal for Wikipedia. Orange’s reach is widespread-Orange has 122 million mobile customers, including 26.7 million users that use a broadband wireless connection. Orange says that two-thirds of mobile devices on the market in Europe are web enabled. Wikimedia has dabbled in the mobile space, creating a mobile formatted site. And there are a few iPhone Wiki apps (note, not made by Wikipedia) that let you browse Wikipedia, including ones made by WikiPock (which also donates a portion of its revenues to the Wikimedia Foundation), Powerset, WikiTap, and WikiMobile.

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Would you pay $10 for an entire offline copy of Wikipedia, the crowdsourced encyclopedia of information that you can get on the Web for free? WikiPock, a Paris-based startup, has compressed the entire English language version of Wikipedia to under 4 gigabytes (not including images), and is selling it for mobile phones. The other language versions are smaller (it also comes in German, French, Polish, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish).

The application lets you search and read Wikipedia articles on your mobile phone without an Internet connection. It can be downloaded directly, or on its own microSD card. For $15, you can download updates, but only for a year. The first 30 people to send an email to tc[at]wikipock[dot]com will get a free copy. It is available for Blackberry and Windows Mobile phones right now, and will soon be available for the iPhone, Android, and Symbian phones.

Since all of these phones can access Wikipedia via their browsers, what you are paying for is offline access, a mobile-friendly format, and fast search. Consumers seem more willing to pay for mobile apps, even when the same information is free on the Web (witness the success of paid apps in iTunes). And at least WikiPock is giving back to the Wikipedia community. Ten percent of all sales will be donated to the Wikimedia Foundation.

Update: For those with iPhones, there is a competing app called Encyclopedia that does pretty much the same thing, and also costs $10.

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You can check it out here, but you might want to visit the help pages first.

The books can be created with a table of contents or category lists and can be downloaded as free PDF files but also ordered as a printed book from PediaPress. PediaPress books are bound in dimensions 8″ x 5.5″ with a color cover and black & white interior, and the prices are reasonable. The cost of a book depends on the number of pages contained in addition to a base fee (starting at $8.90 for 100 pages) and worldwide shipping that’s charged extra.

As indicated by the Foundation, the roll-out for English Wikipedia users will be gradual out of fear for scalability issues, so it’s currently still in test mode. We’re trying to find out when the organization will open it up for non-registered users and will update this post if we learn more.

You can find a sample book on the fascinating subject of ‘Amphibious Aircrafts’ here (PDF).

And if you’re wondering if PediaPress got a sweet deal out of the partnership, the answer is yes. The Wikimedia Foundation receives (only) 10% of the gross total for each book sold. Another part of the agreement is the development of open source software with the goal to ease the reuse of wiki content in other media or applications.

(Image from Wikipedia, hat tip goes to Ross Masters)

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The Mozilla Foundation is putting its weight behind an effort to create an open video format on the Web. It is doing this by giving $100,000 in grant money, to be administered by the Wikimedia Foundation, towards the development and support of Theora, an open-source video codec. More importantly, it is also building support into the Firefox Web browser for both Theora and Vorbis, an open source audio codec.

Many other video codecs and encoders require licensing fees or come with restrictions. Mozilla hopes to change this over time. Although I suspect the Theora video codec is inferior to other technologies, as long as it can improve over time, it could eventually become a serious contender to MPEG-4 or Windows Media Video (WMV).

Evangelist Christopher Blizzard explains why Mozilla is backing open video in a long and windy post:

Although videos are available on the web via sites like youtube, they don’t share the same democratized characteristics that have made the web vibrant and distributed. And it shows. That centralization has created some interesting problems that have symptoms like censorship via abuse of the DMCA and an overly-concentrated audience on a few sites that have the resources and technology to host video. I believe that problems like the ones we see with youtube are a symptom of the larger problem of the lack of decentralization and competition in video technology – very different than where the rest of the web is today.

In my mind there are two things that help drive that kind of decentralization:

* You should be able to easily understand how something moves from a computer-readable format to something that is presented to a user. For example, turning HTML into a document, turning a JPEG file into a picture on the screen or using HTTP to download a file.
* You must be able to implement and deliver that technology without requiring anyone’s permission or license. In reality this means that it should be available on a royalty-free basis and without encumbered documentation.

In the video world, there are some formats that fit the first quality: Some formats are documented, understood and even widely deployed. But more often than not they are subject to to per-unit royalties, large up-front fees and creating content in those formats (the encoders) are often so expensive as to be prohibitive to all but only the deepest-pocketed corporations or well-funded startups. And there are very few video formats that meet the second. This is not the kind of decentralization that made the web thrive. It is quite the opposite.

Beyond the compression algorithms, what is especially exciting about Theora is that as an open-source project it might be easier for it to eventually evolve into a format that can more easily interact directly with other documents and data types on the Web. Videos should include more hyperlinks, for instance, and become part of the very fabric of the Web rather than an exception, which is still how it is treated today.

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Those ten million articles have been written across 250 different languages, Wikipedia says. English is still the most popular language on Wikipedia, with 2.3 million articles (they reached 2 million English articles in September 2007). After English, the next most popular languages are German, French, Polish, Japanese, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish.

See here for an article count by language.

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Last year the foundation had total income of $2.7 million and expenses of about $2.1 million (see financials here). This year revenue should be significantly higher. In addition to this donation, Wikipedia has engaged in significant fundraising efforts over the last year. The foundation has 15 employees and hopes to grow to 25 by 2010.

The foundation has also been under close scrutiny lately around potential conflicts with large donors. at some point, it seems, they should seriously consider proposals to become financially independent via advertising on the site. Even very minor advertising would provide a huge windfall. Nearly a quarter of a billion people visit Wikipedia every month (fifth largest on the Internet), generating nearly 4 billion page views (Comscore worldwide, February 2008).

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