No stopping Facebook

A year ago Facebook lost its patent infringement case against StudiVZ and this was seen as a victory for Germany's home-grown social networking site – at the time, Germany's biggest.  Now it looks like StudiVZ won the battle, but has lost the war:

Facebook,
the social-network service that started in a Harvard dorm room just six
years ago, is growing at a dizzying rate around the globe, surging to
nearly 500 million users, from 200 million users just 15 months ago, writes The New York Times’s Miguel Helft.

In country after country, Facebook is cementing itself as the leader
and often displacing other social networks, much as it outflanked MySpace in the United States. In Britain, for example, Facebook made the formerly popular Bebo all but irrelevant, forcing AOL to sell the site at a huge loss two years after it bought it for $850 million. In Germany, Facebook surpassed StudiVZ, which until February was the dominant social network there.

According to this chart, StudiVZ is no longer even among the top three German social networking sites:

That's not to say that everyone is thrilled with Facebook's global dominance.  The German media is reporting with some Schadenfreude that Facebook is losing users in the US. And the German government will try to drag Facebook back into court – this time for violating Germany's privacy protection laws. But none of this will stop the site's relentless march: Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg is now boasting that it is "almost guaranteed" that he will soon have one billion users.