months before Facebook acquired the business, have seen surges in popularity with younger age groups. Path, the mobile phone-based social network founded by former Facebook employee Dave Morin, which restricts its users to 150 friends, is gaining 1m users a week. It has recently topped 9m users, with 500,000 Venezuelans downloading the app in a single weekend. Facebook is still growing fast in South America. Monthly visitors in Brazil were up 6% in the last month to 70m, according to Socialbakers, whose information is used by Facebook advertisers. India has seen a 4% rise to 64m – still a fraction of the country’s population, leaving room for further growth. But in developed markets, other Facebook trackers are reporting declines. Analysts at Jefferies bank have developed an algorithm that interfaces directly with Facebook software and it “suggests user levels in [the first quarter] may have declined from peak”. Jefferies saw global numbers peak at 1.05bn a month in January, before falling by 20m in February. Numbers rose again in April. The network has now lost nearly 2m visitors in the UK since December, according to research firm Nielsen, with its 27m total flat on a year before. The number of minutes Americans spend on Facebook appears to be falling, too. The total was 121 billion minutes in December 2012, but that fell to 115 billion minutes in February,