San Francisco — In a surprising news last week for social networking fans, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, officially announced the number of users have embraced the online social networking site have climbed to 250 million active users across the world, according to a post on the company blog.
Facebook, continuing its relentless bid to rule the Internet, announced that it had now gained its 250 millionth user, barely over three months after reaching the 200 million plateau, making it one of the fastest growing social networks on the Web, according to Zuckerberg. The news arrived the same day that the Nielsen Co. reported that people spend more time on Facebook than any other Web site.
"The rapid pace of our growth is humbling and exciting for us," Zuckerberg said in a message posted at Facebook’s official blog.
Facebook celebrated the occasion with the launch of a new nonprofit-focused initiative, Facebook for Good. Additionally, the social networking site also celebrated its fifth anniversary on Feb. 4, has stormed past rival MySpace.com, the pioneer of the social networking phenomenon, in monthly page-view counts.
"Today as we celebrate our 250 millionth user, we are also continuing to develop Facebook to serve as many people in the world in the most effective way possible," Zuckerberg wrote. "This means reaching out to everyone across the world and making products that serve all of you, wherever you are–whether through Facebook Connect, new mobile products and the other things that we are building."
"The 250 million of you on Facebook today are what gives Facebook life and makes the site meaningful to everyone using it, so we thank you," wrote Zuckerberg in a blog post. "Each person who joins makes Facebook better by adding a presence to the site that friends and family can connect with and feel closer to. For us, growing to 250 million users is not just an impressive number; it is a mark of how many personal connections all of you have made, and how far we at Facebook have to go to extend the power of connection to the billions of people around the world."
Facebook’s recent growth to popularity has been largely overseas, and according to expert analysis the next frontier for the massive social network would be to make better inroads into countries where people are more likely to be accessing the Web on a mobile device than on a computer.
Facebook Connect, which enables external sites use Facebook login credentials and some profile data, has been one of the company’s most attractive projects since introducing about a year ago. It has also been a big success, with some reports that the company may build a powerful advertising network around it.
Palo Alto, California-based Facebook was founded in 2004 and has become the most favorite online social networking service, eclipssing News Corporation-owned MySpace.
The social networking is also densely populated in the U.S. and Europe, according to a heat map that Zuckerberg posted in his blog, although there has been growth in India, Asia, Australia and South America, especially recently.
Capturing foreign users can be tough, however, according to one Chinese entrepreneur, Calvin Pak, social networks and the Web are used differently by people in different cultures, and Facebook is attractive to Westerners.
Pak, who was born in Hong Kong and educated at U.C. Berkeley, returned to Beijing last year and started Facekoo, a Chinese language social network for Chinese youth.
Facebook claims that 70 percent of its users are outside the U.S. and that the site is available in 50 languages.
Nevertheless, Facebook is still facing a tough challenge from Twitter, another micro-blogging site in the making, though. Twitter last month was doing twice as well at attracting unique visitors to its Web site, although Twitter still has less than 20 percent of Facebook’s hits — 23 million versus 122.6 million in June.