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Was it only four years ago that the anti-Facebook crowd was backlashing against the concept of the News Feed? Time sure flies when you’re accusing the world’s biggest social network of invading its users’ privacy. Forget about the current spasm of criticism; hating on Facebook has been the default setting for a sizable portion of the technosphere — and, it seems, a big chunk of the network’s users — for a while. Type in “anti-Facebook groups” in Google and you get a hit parade of mainstream media articles and blog posts zeroing in on Mark Zuckerberg’s creation.

AllFacebook boasts a nice feature where you can see what the top performing Facebook Pages are – meaning which Pages have gathered the largest following to date. The problem is that there’s apparently a significant lag, and that the data presented is therefor inaccurate (for example, it undercounts the number of fans of the popular Texas Hold’em Poker page by nearly 1.5 million).

Enter Fan Page List, which is entirely dedicated to ranking the most popular Pages on Facebook as well as rankings for various categories, such as Actors, Politicians, Movies, Games, TV Shows, News, Athletes and more, in real time.

One of the categories that is the most interesting is the list of top brands on Facebook.

Let’s have a look, shall we?

The most popular brand on Facebook is … Facebook, with just over 9 million fans. The only other Internet / technology brands in the top 25 are YouTube (#4 with 5,082,029 fans) and Google (#21 with 1,269,926 fans). Food and clothings brands seem to do much better.

In case you’re wondering why Apple is nowhere to be found in the top brands ranking: the Cupertino company doesn’t even have a proper Facebook Page to begin with (it looks like facebook.com/apple was taken by someone else). Microsoft does, but only comes in at #99 with 117,444 fans. But hey, at least they still made the top 100 list, right?

Here are the top 10 brands on Facebook (for the full list, go here):

1) Facebook (9,024,542 Fans)
2) Starbucks (7,217,370 Fans)
3) Coca-Cola (5,529,595 Fans)
4) YouTube (5,082,221 Fans)
5) Disney (3,475,487 Fans)
6) Victoria’s Secret (3,436,811 Fans)
7) Converse (2,743,227 Fans)
McDonald’s (2,260,698 Fans)
9) H&M (2,045,964 Fans)
10) MTV (1,871,241 Fans)

PS: you can get that T-shirt here for $19.99.

AP – Pakistan acknowledged the “suffering” caused by its bans on Facebook and YouTube, but said it would only consider restoring the websites if they take down pages considered offensive to Islam, the information technology ministry said Friday.

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