Facebook is now the most popular social networking site accessed by users of the Opera Mini browser, racking up growth of 600% in 2009.
The site overtook Russian rival VKontakte as a growing list of global subscribers broadened the sites being accessed. The number of subscribers using Opera’s browser surged to 46.3 million in December 2009, a 159% increase over December 2008.
Page views grew 223% to 20.7 billion over the same period.
Opera hails the figures as a success for mobile data traffic, noting its users generated 315 million MB of data in December, which is up 10.5% on November 2009.
Jon von Tetzchner, co-founder of Opera, says the figures show that users increasingly want to access the same sites via mobile that they do on their PC. “Fortunately, the divide between the mobile web and the web accessed on PCs is now disappearing,” he states.
“The success of Facebook and Twitter among Opera Mini users shows that consumers habits do not change even though their devices do,” he added.
Facebook is the fifth most downloaded app in Apple’s US app store and globally the most popular mobile social network,
It ranks in the top ten in all the big US app stores, including no.1 spot on Nokia’s Ovi storefront, according to Distimo.