My old-fashioned, dead-tree version of the February 2008 issue IEEE Computer arrived this afternoon and I glanced at the cover to see what it was all about. The theme of the issue is “The Pervasive Web,” and I noticed that one of the highlighted articles was “Social Networking“, by Alfred C. Weaver and Benjamin B. Morrison. (It’s amusing that I found the article online in just a moment of Googling, and it’s available free to the public; but I would never have known of its existence if the paper copy hadn’t arrived in my office and attracted my attention with its colorful cover).

Anyway, the article is an interesting read, and I invite you to glance at it; it’s relatively short and easy to read. If you’re unfamiliar with social networks like MySpace and Facebook, and if it didn’t occur to you that Wikipedia might be considered a form of “social network,” you’ll gain some new knowledge; but for many of us, it was a relatively pedestrian summary of what we already know.

However, one little statistic caught my eye: the article says that MySpace currently has 217 million registered users. At first I thought this was a typo, because I thought I had read somewhere that MySpace had a mere 100 million users, and that Facebook was catching up fast. But the article provides a link to a Wikipedia page that provides reasonably up-to-date (i.e., last updated a mere three days ago) statistics on a long list of social networking sites, and it too says that MySpace is up to 217 million users. We’ve all learned to be cautious about accepting Wikipedia-based information as the gospel truth, but I’m prepared to accept the number — at least on a provisional basis.

As you can imagine, my first thought was, “Holy cow! That’s bigger than a lot of countries!” In fact, perhaps bigger than most countries … which, of course, led me to the Google search box on my Firefox browser, where I began typing “population of …”, to which Google helpfully provided a list of possible search terms: “population of new hampshire” (who cares?), “population of earth”, “population of the earth”, “population of countries,” “population of nyc”, etc. So, one more click, and I pulled up this handy Wikipedia page titled “List of Worlds by population” (in case you’re interested, it also provides a link to “List of countries by population in 2005” and “List of countries by population in 1907“). It’s somewhat sobering to see that the population of the U.S. has increased by approximately 348% in the past century …

But back to the IEEE Computer article. What I learned, through this brief exercise in Googling, and skimming through the article, is that MySpace is essentially a “virtual nation” with a population larger than every country on earth — except for China, India, the U.S., and Indonesia. Bigger than Brazil, bigger than Pakistan, bigger than Bangladesh and Nigeria and Russia and Japan and Mexico.

And yet they don’t have an army, they don’t have a Congress, they don’t have taxes, they don’t invade other countries, and they don’t require passports to enter or leave. Seems to me we could use a few more countries like this…

I vote that we give MySpace a seat at the United Nations. And Facebook, too; they have a user population of 58 million, which puts them 24th on the world population list, just below Italy. And Friendster, too, even though they’re considered somewhat passe in today’s hip world; they’ve got 50 million users, which puts them just below Facebook and Italy.

If we want to keep the UN membership at its current level of 221 members, that means we should consider dropping the Pitcairn Islands, with its massive population of 50 people (no, not 50 million — just 50). And bye-bye, Vatican City, with its population of 800 — as well as Tokelau, with its population of 1,400 located on three atolls roughly halfway between Hawaii and New Zealand.

Hey, if things keep up this way, it’s only a matter of time before we end up with nothing but virtual nations, and no physical nations