NEW YORK (AP) - More than a billion people
now log into Facebook each month to check up on old friends, tag photos
of new ones and post about politics, religion, cats or what their kids
are doing.
That's double the 500
million it hit in July 2010 - what now seems like a lifetime but was a
little more than two years ago. August 2008 marked another big juncture,
100 million users.
The latest milestone also
amounts to nearly half of the world's roughly 2.5 billion Internet
users, as measured by the International Telecommunications Union.
So who are these people?
Most of them - 81 percent -
live outside of the U.S. and Canada. Many of them log in on mobile
devices rather than personal computers, and the company now has 600
million mobile users.
The people joining now are
young, with a median age of 22. It was 23 in 2010 and 26 in 2008 and
2007. Most of them are from Brazil, India, Indonesia, Mexico and the
United States. They are unlikely to be from China, the world's most
populous country and home to its largest Internet population. And
millions of them are not actual people. Facebook acknowledged in August
that 8.7 percent of its then-955 million users may be duplicate or false
accounts. At that rate, as many as 87 million accounts are fake.
As expected, the longer
users are on Facebook, the more "friends" they have on the site. A user
who signed up two years ago has an average of 305 friends. Someone who
signed up in December 2005, when Facebook had nearly 6 million users,
now has nearly 600 friends, on average.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg marked
the milestone on his Facebook page, as he has in the past when the
site's users hit nice round numbers.
"If you're reading this:
thank you for giving me and my little team the honor of serving you," he
wrote. "Helping a billion people connect is amazing, humbling and by
far the thing I am most proud of in my life."
But he acknowledged in a "Today" show interview that the company is going through a difficult patch.
"We're in a tough cycle now
and that doesn't help morale, but people are focused on what they're
building," he told Matt Lauer during the interview.
The Menlo Park,
Calif.-based company's stock never recovered from a botched initial
public offering in May, at one point seeing its value slashed in half by
shareholders who don't think it's increasing revenue fast enough,
especially from its fast-growing mobile user base.
Last month Zuckerberg gave
his first interview since Facebook's shaky IPO and since that time he's
been working hard to boost confidence among investors, employees and the
public.
The 28-year-old executive
also continued to reassure that he is the right person to lead Facebook,
as some on Wall Street have questioned whether he has the ability to
lead a large public company.
"I take this responsibility very seriously," he said.
To further mark the
occasion, Facebook also released a video Thursday that, somewhat
abstractly, seeks to illustrate its ubiquity and utility in connecting
people to one another. Directed by Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu ("Babel,"
''21 Grams" and "Amores Perros"), the video starts off with an empty
red chair suspended in midair in a forest. Then it moves to chairs with
people, first just one then two, and groups around a dinner table,
dancing, playing. Then more chairs.
"Chairs. Chairs are made so
that anyone can sit down and take a break. Anyone can sit on a chair," a
woman's voice assures the viewer. "And if the chair is large enough,
they can sit down together. And tell jokes. Or make up stories. Or just
listen. Chairs are for people. And that is why chairs are like
Facebook."
See also: doorbells, airplanes and bridges.
"These are things people
use to get together so they can open up and connect," the ad continues.
The conclusion? The universe is vast and dark and makes us wonder if we
are alone. And there is Facebook. And chairs, of course.
It's Facebook's first
advertising campaign surrounding its brand. So far, though, the company
is not saying whether the video will air on television.
Facebook Inc.'s stock slipped a penny to $21.82 in afternoon trading. The shares are 43 percent below their $38 IPO price.
___
Online:
The Facebook chair video: http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=3802752155040
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