It was only three months ago that Facebook announced that it had reached 200 million users worldwide. Today, CEO Mark Zuckerberg says the social network has passed 250 million active users. And back in January it was just 150 million.
Facebook has been accused of under-counting users in the past. According to comScore, Facebook had 316 million unique visitors worldwide in May, but not all of them necessarily had accounts.
No matter which way you slice it, adding 50 million users in three months is nothing short of amazing. Most Websites would kill for a fraction of that growth. How long before Facebook reaches one billion, and can it beat Twitter to that milestone?
Update: Here is a heat map, showing the global distribution of Facebook’s growth over time:
And I still don’t understand why.
I hope you’re not in the .com business.
WHO IS DIS
WHO IS DIS
“How long before Facebook reaches one billion, and can it beat Twitter to that milestone?”
This comment is getting epic lols on FriendFeed.
Seriously. Twitter is not even in the same league as Facebook. Evidence here:
http://www.alex...com+myspace.com
wow. This is almost the population of all of the US.
Its pretty amazing if you think that way.
Yes it is.
And every hacker is about to think the same thing.
FB is now one of the most attractive hacker targets.
Oh noes! They might have access to pictures of me grilling hamburgers!
Yes it is.
And every hacker reading this thinks the same way.
FB is now among the most attractive hacking targets.
I don’t think they are under counting users, I personally log in to FB from 2 different computers and my Iphone every month so I’m probably 4 unique visitors and one user.
Unique visitors isn’t any kind of way to count users. Surely Facebook, as a tech company, have some sort of ability to count the number of accounts they have. I’m sure the work experience girl could just look up a database.
From Scoble:
“Facebook is growing the size of a Twitter every few weeks. No way Twitter get there first”
correct, Twitter is an will remain a niche product
i doubt they will get to 1 billion with countries like China blocking Facebook…
sorry, slowing down their site…LOL
I haven’t talked with my Father in 3 years (for reasons I wont disclose) and the way we did connect eventually was through him contacting me through Facebook. I was so impressed by him joining Facebook (he’s in his late 50’s) that I had to give him a call and we solved our issue.
BTW: STR3EM – the replacement for DVD and Blu-ray using Facebook Connect coming in August 2009.
What a great time to be a Facebook developer, congratulations to them for a job well done.
wow that’s heartwarming, try doing that with twitter
>You must have a minimum of 32 Facebook friends to buy, rent, or join a membership
Why are you excluding the lonely and socially inept?
Just a requirement that will kill video piracy.
STR3EM SUCKS
My hat is off to Facebook. They continue to innovate in very meaningful ways. Ways that most huge sites would deem too risky.
Facebook is largest social networking website in the world.Even Twitter is also growing day by day.
Its easy to predict where the user-count will saturate. Just look at the most popular web-service (email). The top-3 web-mail providers (Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail) collectively have ~600M users (flat in US, but growing at a decent 5-10% per year clip in Asia).
That is the upper-bound for any webservice.
wow …. another milestone. I wonder if they will be 1 Billion by end of the year ? I just checked Yahoo(wikipedia), they serve 280Million Users, I wonder which service has the largest user base count …
WHERE ARE THE TWITTER DOCUMENTS
+1
+1
You guys have figured out that if you include the word “Twitter” in every article, it will get readers to post replies. Really smart. Otherwise, your comment about Twitter getting to a billion users first is pure idiocy.
Steve,
my thoughts exactly…talk about bait!
“Lemme reference twitter here just for some good ole folks bashing twitter by writing comments about twitter in response to a twitter reference”
Talk about keeping a brand out there!
You guys have figured out that if you include the word “Twitter” in every article, it will get readers to post replies. Really smart. Otherwise, your comment about Twitter getting to a billion users first is pure idiocy.
Yeah double-posts are way better
Nothing like a T-t-t-ripple P-p-p-ost!!!
Nothing like a T-t-t-ripple P-p-p-ost!!
no one in Brazil….ah orkut
not for long
http://www.insi...azil-and-india/
Just the number of active users they are adding everyday, lots of sites would love to get that much traffic to their site in a day. Amazing metrics!
Facebook has TONS of fake profiles on their website. Just search for a common female name in your regional network and you’ll eventually find hundreds of bogus profiles with common patterns which are obviously fake. I have reported hundreds in my regional network alone and those profile are STILL on the website. It’s obviously an internal user count boost method.
“How long before Facebook reaches one billion, and can it beat Twitter to that milestone?”
Don’t forget, Facebook users almost always have just *one* Facebook account. It would be dilutive to yourself to have more than one account in Facebook.
Twitter is not like that. Some accounts (like Google’s multiple twitter accounts) are easily identified as one entity. Other multiple accounts are not so easy to identify as belonging to the same person/entity.
So Facebook’s achievement with real people interacting with other real people using real names is even more remarkable.
-prash.
It may seem weird, but Twitter will reach 1 billion faster than Facebook. I doubt Facebook will ever reach 1 billion at all.
Neither Facebook nor Twitter will ever hit 1 billion users. Think about it, that’d be every single person (from newborns to seniors who don’t even use computers) in the USA, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Australia, Spain, Japan, Brazil and Egypt combined. That’s 16% of the entire world, when more than that percentage of the world probably doesn’t even own a computer. Never gonna happen.
but they have phones right….
Don’t count out mobile devices though…
Frankly, I’m skeptical that a person who has an advanced enough phone to access and use Facebook or Twitter exclusively wouldn’t own a computer.
Take a look at that map above and which areas Facebook expanded to. North America, continental Europe, Venezuela, Colombia, Israel, India, South Africa and Hong Kong; all places where English-speaking people live or visit predominantly. It’s growing internationally because we’re taking it with us as we travel, and comparing the light spots on the map with the dark ones, it clearly isn’t catching on everywhere.
Ever Dave? Quite the little soothsayer aren’t you? I’m sure you’re Daddy must’ve said the same thing about the internet 15 years ago.
your*
There is probably a major discrepancy between unique visitors and account – much more than in other sites – like:
http://www.trip...alls-Index.html
My kid accesses 5 different facebook accounts (for the games) from the same IP address and I access the same facebook account from 5 different IP addresses.
Isn’t it enough to say it is real big?
Smells like bullshit to me… There is absolutely no way they can continue their growth like this. I foresee a giant fraud investigation…
i like twitter much more than facebook, always will
Extremely impressive! I wonder how many of those stick around.
It’s an active user count. The number of *actual* accounts signed up far exceeds 250 million.
Facebook’s photo storage servers are currently crashing.
And now the site is apparently down. This is all this article’s fault.
Facebook is going to continue to outdo twitter for quite some time – twitter is all about the present, and facebook allows for some background and foundation building.
Yeah Facebook is experiencing a big old dose of fail whale right now…
aol will take em over both
does anyone have any links to articles regarding the effectiveness of advertising within the large social networks?
I get the sense that its not quite as effective as agencies/brands had hoped but i’m looking for some statistics. Thanks
According to the trusty ol’ “World Internet Stats website”….250,000,000 users would be 15.66% of the total internet users which is currently 1,596,270,108.
Facebook has 1,346,270,108 more people to signup.
http://www.inte...s.com/stats.htm
Facebook is the top social networking site. No doubt about that. It is far better than others in the business.
I’m a traditionalist. I think there’s more pleasure in keeping your private life to yourself. So if you have friends that you hang out with why is there a need to advertise that on facebook!? As far as curiosity goes facebook has been a bit cheeky in tempting people to sign up and even getting them to long on with those random generated links that are sent to your mailbox. So all in all I would look at that number -%80. Sure they will argue their case.
One should also blame facebook culture for eradication of organic social interaction.
Are these people using the site or just people registering? Because I have had multiple accounts shut down by Facebook for their Fascist reasons (particularly posting on Sarah Palin’s page conflicting viewpoints). And I have just reregistered under a new account. I know a few dozen people personally that have done this. So are they adding or are people rejoining after Fascist Facebook blocks the original account.
I don’t use facebook anymore after the UK government announced they were “following” people using the service. If you ask me the site is fun, but it is way to easy to exploit and causes more social strife than social pleasure.
I blogged about why I left facebook. You can read about that if you feel so inclined at
http://www.befo...re-friends-for/
Facebook is really getting popular so its obvious that their user also increasing. Great info.
HOW IS EVERY BODY IN TWITTER TODAY HIT ME UP ON MYSPACE BABEZ LADIES ONLY YA DIG BUCKNER50@YMAIL.COM SEND ME A REQUEST BER!!!!!!!
no one else noticed the spelling error in the title?