Social Media giant Facebook is burgeoning by the day and seems to be approaching garangatuan proportions.
Techland time reports that Facebook sources told Techcrunch that the social network’s user count has just passed 750 million. This development comes less than one year after Facebook crossed the 500 million user milestone.
Though Facebook has not officially confirmed the number there is speculation that the social network is probably waiting to reach 1 billion users before making an announcement. According to a Facebook spokesperson it was not a new thing to them as their company is growing since the time it was started. Neither have they found any use of updating their registered users count.
A techieask report says, “A Goldman Sachs report informed that Facebook had 600 millions users in January 2011. Apart from this there have been unofficial declarations about Facebook’s growth. At present, there are may sources tracking Facebook’s update including its rivals. Social Bakers reported in May 2011 that Facebook has 699 million users and some sources from inside of Facebook reported the figure to be around 700 million users.”
The most important thing to note here is that Facebook counting of users differs from other online services. Facebook counting does not include the users who have stopped using their services, unlike other reports which take into account all the users who have registered.
However, there seem to be some wisps of troublesome clouds hovering over Facebook. Techland time reports, “despite the high numbers, there are some signs of trouble, particularly in the countries that were quick to adopt the social network.”
Inside Facebook has reported that active users in the United States dropped by 6 million in May. There have been other reports which show that Facebook is still growing in the U.S., albeit slower than ever before.
However, Techland thinks that Facebook need not really keep track of users in early adopter countries as what is more important is making money off those users, as the company sees investments in the billions. Keeping this end in mind Facebook has been playing around with new kinds of experiments such as real-time ads based on users’ status updates. The company’s latest experiment is users’ comment based ads.
Facebook is also expanding on the services which it offers. It now has an email service, a broad partnership with Skype, has dabbled in streaming movies and is rumoured to be working on a big social music service. Hence, irrespective of the number of its users Facebook is growing huge and what remains to be seen is whether users will avail all of these services or will they limit themselves to following friends, exchanging and exclaiming at photos and discussing their life online.