FACEBOOK - HOW DO YOU COMPARE?
So, there are over 200 million Facebook users. That accounts for almost 3% of the population of our planet. That, in anyones book, is a lot! Let's dig a little further and see how you compare to your average Facebook user..
Regular users
To begin with, half of those 100 million people log on to Facebook more than once a day. Over two thirds of the users of Facebook have left school or any type of formal education. Its user base isn't quite as young as you might think.
Indeed, the fastest growing user group are those aged over 35. Why? Well when people lose touch with each other, as they do when they get older, Facebook allows them to find those long lost friends, loves and colleagues. It's the Friends Reunited of our decade.
How many friends do you have?
Most people have 120 friends on Facebook, apparently. Thats surprisingly high as an average in our opinion. But it's nothing compared to the amount of time people dedicate to Facebook...3.5 billion minutes - a day!
A staggering 20 million people update their profiles - every day. More than 4 million become fans of certain pages every day.
What do people do on Facebook
Over 850 million images are uploaded to the site every month - 4 a month for each of its users. There are 8 million videos uploaded every month. More than a billion pieces of web content are shared on Facebook every single week - everything from web links to news stories, blog posts to notes and the ever present photographs.
There are more than 2.5 million events created every month and 25 million active user groups.
International
There are more than 40 translations of the site and Facebook are in the process of developing another 50! Around 70% of the user base comes from outside of the USA.
Facebook has more than 660,000 developers and entrepeneurs from more than 180 countries. Every month, more than 70% of users engage with one of Facebooks applications. There are a quite astonishing 52,000 applications in the directory at the time of writing.
More than 5,000 of those applications have 10,000 or more active users - every month. Over 8,000 websites have deployed Facebook Connect since it went live in December 2008.
On the move
More than 30 million users access Facebook on a mobile device - 15% of the user base.
These are the hardcore fans - and they're 50% more active than all other Facebook users. Because of that, they have a big commercial following with over 150 mobile operators, in more than 50 countries, working to promote and deploy Facebook products.
Context
Is it actually possible to get to grips with those figures? 3% of the world population? To put that into context, if Facebook was a country it would be the fifth highest populated on Earth (after China, India, USA and Indonesia). You'd have to combine the population of the UK, Germany and France to match it.
When you consider there are 850 million cars on our planet and that Facebook users match that figure with images uploaded in a single month - you start to realise that we're talking about big big numbers.
More Facebook Facts
It's reasonable to say that Facebook is the darling of the internet in respect of success stories. Since it was launched in February 2004 it has become a household name. So what sits behind the scenes?
To begin with, when you have the second most visited PHP site in the world you need a lot of power. Facebook runs on one of the worlds largest MySQL installations - with thousands of databases. The company is the worlds largest user of a system called 'Memcached', an open source caching system.
Its first investment came in the form of $500,000 from Peter Thiel in the Summer of 2004, just months after launch. A year later as it began to demonstrate its power, Facebook received funding of $12.7 million from Accel Partners. It has since received a further $27.5 million investment from Greylock Partners, Meritech Capital Partners, Accel Partners and Peter Thiel.
It employs over 850 people and has a main board of 5 directors plus 2 observers. Its main headquarters are in Pala Alto in California but it also has offices in Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Detroit, New York, Venice Beach, Dublin (Ireland), London (UK) and Paris (France).
Its founder, Mark Zuckerburg, is only 24 years of age.
It is rumoured that Zuckerburg has rejected offers in excess of one billion dollars to sell Facebook. Various reports suggest that the directors value the company at over $8 billion based on projected revenues for the next few years.
Over 1.5 million iPhone owners use the Facebook application specifically developed for it.
Facebook is banned in Syria. Over 2,500 users helped in the Turkish translation of the site.
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