Have a look at these impressive figures for the surging Facebook phenomenon across the ‘Muslim world’.

Egypt has added 450,000 new users in the past month. Saudi Arabia (a much smaller country) has added 420,000.

These are absolutely big numbers, the more so since (by definition) they represent better-off web-savvy classes of people.

OK, the total reach of Facebook in eg Egypt is still small – only some 6.8% of the Egyptian population. Saudi Facebook penetration is higher at approaching 14%.

But monthly growth like this starts to create whole new orders of magnitude of possible networking effects among the population as a whole, and new orders of control problems for the state insofar as the state wants to do something to monitor it all. Plus if the state tries to limit the way Facebook works, a lot of influential people will be annoyed simultaneously.

Have a look at this typically thorough and interesting Harvard study of the Russian blogosphere.

At 2.2 Internet Penetration there is a remarkable graph, showing how those who have little Internet access massively trust Russian state TV, while those with Internet access are tending to trust the Internet more than state TV.

In other words, blogging and Facebook-style social networking on a grand scale do start to change the way people in Russia look at traditional authority of the ‘sacred state’ – they start to think and feel differently about state power and their own power.

Whether or not Facebook already directly contributes to the upheavals in the Middle East, its fast-growing use means that word of bad state behaviour is going to spread like wildfire, as never before.

Faster, please.