Last summer we took a look at Facebook usage around the world, and with Facebook recently announcing that they’re currently at over 800 million active users we thought it would be interesting to extrapolate their current grown rate and estimate when they’re likely to hit a billion active users.

Using a process of linear regression on the data from the end of 2008 onwards we expect Facebook to hit a billion active users around August 2012. Looking at the data from 2006-mid 2008 it looks like Facebook was growing at an exponential rate, however more recent data suggests it’s growing in a linear fashion.

Facebook’s growth has slowed or stopped in many of its early adopting countries such as the US and the UK. However, developing countries such as India and Brazil have shown strong growth with India growing from 22million users to 36 million and Brazil going from 13 million to 30 million in the last 9 months. Both are large countries with millions of potential users who have yet to sign up to Facebook, with only 3% of India’s population on Facebook and 16% of Brazil’s (compared to 49% of America’s population or 47% of the UK’s population) countries such as these will clearly contribute heavily to Facebook’s continued growth.

This article was originally published by Gregory Lyons  on iCrossing on January 11, 2012