

Facebook now has 500 million users - mcxx
http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=409753352130

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brianbreslin
That is 500 ACTIVE they say. I'd guess they have close to 600million accounts,
maybe 650m.

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teej
Facebook's user ids are generated sequentially. If you register a new account
today, your user id (without padding) will be over 1.2 billion [1].

I also find it hard to believe that 75%+ of people who have -ever signed up
for Facebook- would be active in the past month.

\------------------------------

[1] Obviously not all of these are real, many could have been deleted, etc.
But we're talking about gross number of accounts, not humans.

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tlrobinson
They haven't always been globally sequential though. It used to be of the form
AAAABBBBB where AAAA was the school ID and BBBBB was the user ID within that
school.

I don't know where they started the current sequential IDs from, but it was
probably at least 100,000,000, which would have allowed for 3 digit school
IDs.

I could be totally wrong though.

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nixy
The figures are amazing. I would love to see some Facebook research people
calculate the "six degrees" using their user's networks. What would the
average x be in "x degrees" for two avarage users on Facebook?

~~~
ryanf
Years ago Facebook had a feature that would show you the shortest paths
between you and the person you were looking at. I don't know if they got rid
of it for privacy or performance reasons, but it was pretty cool.

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blueberry
_Half a billion is a nice number, but the number isn't what really matters
here_

Right, what matters is the bigger number, 25 billion, which is what Facebook
is worth.

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rokhayakebe
Facebook adds users faster than people are being born. If this growth doesn't
decline at some point every person on earth will be on FB.

~~~
olegk
Except that most people don't have internet access. Only like 25% of the world
population.

<http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm>

~~~
cryptoz
Interestingly, that all depends on how you define "internet access". They say
a user is someone who has knowledge of the web and the ability to access the
internet. (from <http://www.internetworldstats.com/surfing.htm>)

However, according to Wikipedia, most people have a cell phone (67% of the
world population). I would consider access to the cellular network equal to
access to the Internet, since many services (such as Google's) are available
to cell users.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_mobile_phones_in_use)

Edit: And for what it's worth, I think you can operate your Facebook account
fully through just a phone and text messages (but I could be wrong). No need
for a full-blown computer and high speed internet.

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notahacker
Unless they're planning on launching an SMS-only service then Facebook might
find it tougher reaching the developing world on their phones than the cyber
cafes. People without internet access don't have iPhones or 3G networks.
Though I just walked past a news broadcast with Facebook's Director of Policy
observing that mobile was the key to penetrating areas like Africa...

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RoboTeddy
That's 1 in every 13 people on earth

~~~
dboyd
That's 1 in every 10 people with electricity.

If we assume that people who live on less than $10 a day don't have a
computer, or access to one, or cannot actively use Facebook on whatever
computer they do have access to...

    
    
      That's 5 in every 13 people who have access to Facebook.
    
    

Population and other stats from:
[http://www.globalissues.org/article/26/poverty-facts-and-
sta...](http://www.globalissues.org/article/26/poverty-facts-and-stats)

~~~
patrickaljord
Many people here in Peru don't have computers but they all go to cyber cafe
and use their hi5 and facebook account there.

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BrandonDC
I wonder what their definition of an "active user" is.

I would be curious to know how many of their users have signed in within the
last year and how many of those users have more than 0 friends.

~~~
indigoviolet
Returned to the site in the last 30 days.

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ck2
How many "apps" does facebook have?

Because the app count should be subtracted from the user count.

I bet the real number of active accounts is half that or less.

~~~
txt

        *  More than 500 million active users
        * 50% of our active users log on to Facebook in any given day
        * Average user has 130 friends
        * People spend over 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook
    
    

# More than one million developers and entrepreneurs from more than 180
countries # Every month, more than 70% of Facebook users engage with Platform
applications # More than 550,000 active applications currently on Facebook
Platform # More than one million websites have integrated with Facebook
Platform # More than 150 million people engage with Facebook on external
websites every month # Two-thirds of comScore’s U.S. Top 100 websites and half
of comScore’s Global Top 100 websites have integrated with Facebook

<http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics>

They aren't going anywhere for awhile, this is exactly why I've spent so much
time developing apps JUST for FB.

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chrisb
And are they successful? Do you make money from them (if that's your aim)?

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blader
So does this mean this is the year people will finally give up on calling
Facebook a "fad"?

~~~
blueberry
Based on real life experience, IMO some people would rather extend the
definition of "fad" to include Google and Microsoft than stop calling Facebook
a "fad".

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Ardit20
So about 1.5 billion have access to the internet, assuming that the 500
million users are unique users, then 1/3 of the internet population is on
Facebook. That's the end of the beginning of globalisation for you, now all we
have to do is create a global culture and pretty soon thereafter nation states
would be part of history like principates.

