Los Angeles — Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg yesterday issued its own eye-popping status update: The 6-year-old social networking site has long ago surpassed MySpace to become king, but the site had just surpassed 500 million users around the world, the company said on Wednesday, meaning one in every 14 people on the planet has now signed up to the online social-networking service.
“This is an important milestone for all of you who have helped spread Facebook around the world,” Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg said in a blog post. “Now a lot more people have the opportunity to stay connected with the people they care about.” Zuckerberg went on to include a few recent Facebook success stories, including the unlikely tale of Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who used Facebook to find jogging partners.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said he never imagined all of the ways people would use the social networking site when he started it six years ago. (Sebastien Nogier, Reuters / July 22, 2010)
And now, six years after getting it up and running in a Harvard dorm room, the Internet marvel that has transformed how the world communicates is eyeing another distinction–connecting one out of every seven human beings on the planet. “Active,” as Facebook defines the term, means the user has logged in at least once in the past 30 days.
All of which has lent credibility to Zuckerberg’s confident assertion that it was aspiring to have 1 billion members, matching the reach of Internet search giant Google Inc. If it can maintain its current menacing pace, a feat that would defy predictions from analysts, Facebook could reach that goal by next year.
“We all love to dream big around here,” said Randi Zuckerberg, the sister of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg who handles marketing. “We are going to take a day or so to celebrate 500 million users before we start thinking about going beyond that.”
To mark the occasion, Facebook has launched an application called Facebook Stories, which allows users to share a post with everyone using the application, rather than just friends.
Up to now, the stories seem to concentrate on how much users love Facebook. It remains to be seen how more negative viewpoints will be handled.
Choosing to use Facebook Stories means communicating your basic information, such as your name, profile picture, gender, networks, user ID, list of friends, and any other information you have shared with everyone, your birthday, and your current city.
Such distribution alerts privacy advocates and precipitates periodic privacy crises at Facebook. But it appears to have done little to dissuade people from using the service.
Zuckerberg created Facebook as a place for college students to connect with one another. Since then it has been on a tear.