Facebook blasts past the half-a-billion benchmark.
The counters clicked and the buzz intensified all week until Facebook passed the 500 million mark. Defying predictions and expectations, the Earth did not shift on its axis nor did anything especially spectacular happen on the website. People kept on posting their vacation pictures and random thoughts as usual. Historians did take time to pontificate on the occasion’s momentousness, intoning “brought the world closer” and “an unprecedented phenomenon.”
CEO Mark Zuckerberg told his blog readers, “I could have never imagined all of the ways people would use Facebook when we were getting started six years ago. I want to thank you for being part of making Facebook what it is today and for spreading it around the world.” As he celebrated his brainchild’s latest benchmark, Zuckerberg also announced “Facebook Stories,” a collection of readers’ anecdotes about the interesting, unusual, innovative, and revolutionary ways they have capitalized on the social network and its special features.
For the sake of a little comparison, those half-billion users are equivalent to the entire population of the United States and twice the population of Mexico…combined. At any given time, approximately half of the users are logged onto the site, and they tote-up more than 700 billion minutes per month. Productivity experts estimate that Facebook, by far the United States’ biggest office distraction or diversion, accounts for loss of more than 300,000 American work hours every month. And for the sake of a little surprise, more than 70% of those half-billion Facebook users live and work outside the United States—a revolutionary turn from the early days when Zuckerberg restricted Facebook use to students at Ivy League colleges…and Stanford, as an afterthought.
Privacy and security issues persist.
In the aftermath of Congressional inquiries and consumers’ repeated, very public and very well-publicized complaints, Facebook has revised it privacy policies and practices several times in the last three months. “I spoke with three well-laced corporate IT professionals today,” reports Danielle Brooks, media analyst at Patterson-Forbes Partners, “and none of them could explain Facebook privacy settings with any certainty. All three advised me, ‘If you’re gonna put it on Facebook, you had better assume that the whole world and all the angels are gonna read it’.”
From 30 billion unique pieces of content generated each month, Facebook users click-through to more than a million websites integrated with the FB platform, and experts estimate that the social network’s “self-service” ads generate at least $500 million(usd) every year. Despite being perfectly position for an initial public offering, neither Zuckerberg nor any of his board members have given even the slightest indication of the company’s going public anytime soon.
