Istanbul: Pundits these days tout the impending demise of Facebook. But sitting here getting ready to address an audience of over 1,000 Turkish marketing managers I’m being shown some data. Facebook is the 5th most popular place on the web in the US. But in Turkey it’s number 2. Everywhere I go in Europe Facebook is exploding. (Alexa says Facebook is the number 1 site in Canada)

At the recent web 2.0 conference in Berlin I asked who’s on Facebook and of hundreds in the audience I could count just a few who didn’t put up their hands. True this is anecdotal evidence, but as Dylan says “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”

The pundits don’t like Facebook because the company ignores them. They have lousy public relations and it’s tough to get through to anyone in management. Further they make blunders like Beacon only to backtrack with profuse apologies. More “cult of the amateur I guess.”

Trouble is they continue to grow. And there is no evidence that their actual customers are moving elsewhere.

The reason? Think about your own Facebook. Where else would you go and still be able to communicate with your friends. And think about how prohibitive the costs would be for you to re-organize your digital social life somewhere else. Facebook is the Internet analogy to the phone system. Nobody is going to create another phone system in the near future.

Moreover, the fact that 50,000 Facebook members organized to change it’s policy on Beacon is, as they say in software, a feature not a bug. That’s what real dynamic communities do.