I was interested to read that Microsoft have over 17,597 employees registered on Facebook out of a total of 70,000 employees.

I thought I would try to discover how other leading IT companies compared, including my own. The staff numbers come from Google Finance and the rounding errors come from me.

The following Facebook networks are only open to company employees with a valid email address although, obviously, a better metric would have been some measure of recent activity.

Company Employeees Facebook FB Factor (%)
Google 10,674 5,545 51.9
Yahoo! 11,400 3,911 34.3
Microsoft 71,000 17,980 25.3
Sun 14,000 2,942 21.0
IBM 355,766 23,400 6.6
Oracle 74,674 4,280 5.7
SAP 41,919 2,300 5.4
HP 186,000 9,742 5.2
Intel 90,300 4,219 4.7

Inevitably, I guess - Google lead the way (again) but I was surprised to see that Sun Microsystems have a significant proportion of Facebook members.

IBM were slightly lower than I expected until I remembered that half their 350,000 employees are busy building fantasy worlds in Second Life. No wonder I can’t get spare parts for my Thinkpad.

Nice to see Oracle positioned just ahead of SAP after recent discussions about the companies’ respective contributions and reputation in the Web 2.0 community.

I still have wildly oscillating feelings about Facebook; on one hand, a walled garden, puerile, teenage and gimmicky but undoubtedly an insidious, strangely compulsive and probably important platform.

PS. For example, I have just seen the immortal words ‘Andy and Mark Burgess (The Chameleons) are now friends’. Superb.