WebProNews

Facebook's scoring some big gains in the world's second- and fifth-most populous countries.  New stats indicate that the social network's growth rate has started imitating the upright angle of a hockey stick in both India and Brazil.

Justin Smith reported, "Facebook nearly doubled in Brazil during May alone.  Its growth has continued in June, and today Facebook has just crossed the 1 million active user mark in Brazil for the first time ever - up 100% in the last 45 days."

As for the Indian side of things, he wrote, "Facebook exploded in May and June, doubling from 1.6 million to 3.2 million monthly active users in the country in the last 60 days."

And this second achievement is interesting for one other reason: Facebook actually made six Indian language versions available in early May.  So it might be seeing a fast and big payoff if there's any sort of causation effect.

Also, looking at the development as a whole, we noted while covering the Indian languages release that Orkut is popular in India and Brazil, so all of this recent growth appears to represent a serious challenge to Google.