Millions of users left Facebook in May

The Huffington Post reports: Facebook is almost at 700 million users, but it recently experienced big dips in U.S. and Canadian growth.

According to Inside Facebook, the social networking site hit 687 million monthly users in June, though the growth rate overall has been slower than normal for the past two months. Though for the past year Facebook has grown by at least 20 million users each month, in April and in May, it grew by 13.9 and 11.8 million respectively.

And in the U.S. and in Canada, Facebook actually lost users. [Ed. note: me included]

U.S. accounts fell by close to 6 million, from 155.2 million at the beginning of May to 149.4 million at the end. This marks the first time American Facebook membership has dropped in the last year. Canadian users also fell by about 1.5 million.

Inside Facebook notes that once about 50 percent of a country's population is on Facebook, growth basically stops. Indeed, losses over 100,000 were recorded by the U.K., Norway, and Russia.

Meanwhile, Facebook's growth was bolstered by gains in developing countries like Mexico, Brazil and India, each of which picked up about 2 million users from May to June.

TechCrunch also pointed out that Twitter and LinkedIn are making big gains in many of the surveyed countries, with Twitter coming in as the number two social network for the U.S., the U.K., Canada, Australia, Germany and France.

There is little doubt that Twitter is now entrenched in serious competition with Facebook for the much grander social networking crown. After announcing that it would finally be bringing native photo and video sharing to its service on June 1, Twitter's biggest product win to-date came on Tuesday, when Apple announced that iOS 5 would include deep Twitter integration.

Thanks Evan.