The world's largest social networking site just got bigger with the announcement it has 300 million active monthly users from around the globe.
Facebook also revealed that it had started making money ahead of schedule.
The company had not expected to start turning a profit until sometime in 2010.
"This is important to us because it sets Facebook up to be a strong independent service for the long term," said Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.
"We are succeeding at building Facebook in a sustainable way. We are just getting started on our goal of connecting everyone.
"We face a lot of fun and important challenges that require rethinking the current systems for enabling information flow across the web," Mr Zuckerberg said in a blog post.
'Milestones'
The news that Facebook had passed these two benchmarks was made at TechCrunch 50 in San Francisco, a conference for start ups.
Facebook hit the 250 million user mark back in July. It is estimated that the site is gaining about five million new users a week, or 50 million in the last 75 days.
"Passing these milestones to me means we can continue to fund our development and our innovation and be self sustaining as we grow this network," Mike Schroepfer, Facebook's vice-president of engineering, told BBC News.
"We think 300 million is a just a step on the way to get as much of the entire world on the social network communicating with the friends and family and the people they want to communicate with."
"That Facebook is able to continue this growth and build a "cash-flow positive" business is an impressive feat," said Nick O'Neill of AllFacebook.com.
"If the company can cover the cost of scaling to one billion users and still manage to break even, there's no doubt that the company will have a great opportunity to rake in billions," added Mr O'Neill.
Facebook's Mr Schroepfer said the company had worked hard to get more money flowing in than out.
"The growth of the network has certainly helped us go cash-positive and the engineering team has done a lot of innovation on our ad products, as our business is primarily advertising-funded.
"As more and more of the world gets on the network, people and advertisers realise the power of sharing information, whether it's about a movie preview or a car," said Mr Schroepfer.
Look out Twitter, said Ben Parr, who is associate editor at the social media blog Mashable.com.
"If Facebook continues to open up its platform and adopt Twitter's best features, it could spell trouble for the Twitterverse. The world's largest social network is on the warpath," warned Mr Parr.
BBC News. Sep. 16, 2009.
Posts
4 comments:
Hi! First time to post my comment in here.
Looking at the title, "Facebook", really near all of us. I don't think there are any problems for the fast network development and the fast expansion of "Facebook". As it may be helping the economic growth, and it maybe good for us.
However, fast development of interenet causing youngsters usually lack of face-to-face communication in our generation. As youngsters usually meet friends in chatrooms, msn, these kind of internet commuication systems. Youngsters often lack of communication skills because of this.
On the other hand, i realise that human beings,us, are starting to retrograde.
Let's see if you forgot to bring along your phone, what will happen ? Missing lots of important calls, cuting almost all connection with your friends, colleages for a day, and lots of messy things would go on.
Technology really conviencing all of us, but the fact is that making us more lazy.
Please don't tackle my poor english, thanks=)
I think its a very good news, it has provided some statistics which show that the importancy and the utility of facebook. I was shocked by the information that there are million of people will applicate facebook...
And the company feel suprised that they can earn the profit ahead from the schedule.
In my point of view, i think the fast development of internet have both advantages and disadvantages, there are serval advantages, firstly, nowadays there are many parents will send their children to oversea for receiving education, through internet they may not have the problem of communication. Secondly, for business, the company can reduce the cost through internet, for example, they can have video-conferencing instead of flying to other countries, it can save the time and money.
For Disadvantages, through internet will lead to the problem of teenagers will focus on computer and lack of studying. And it is harmful to their eyes by looking at the screen for a long time.
I appreciate of the creator of Facebook, he is really smart and brave enough, although there are xanga and forums etc., but facebook can still hold a large market sharing and earned a huge profit.
If there are any grammatical mistakes, please FORGIVE me.
Andy and Barnaby,
Don't worry about making mistakes. It is not a big problem. All you need to do is keep on using English, and I'm sure your English will improve in the coming days.
Mr. Fu
facebook, the name of it makes me think of the exposure of individuals secrets instead of making friends. privacy is very important to all of us, we trust people mainly is about the "face to face interaction", many research had told us that, internet communication is destorying our normal communication among people. it is not wrothy to waste such time on doing things that cannot help us on anything.
the growing of the internet has become a very big issue, even in the advertising industy. long ago in the 56k modem ages, there is already spam mail. facebook is now built up in such a scale, attracting some many people, letting facebook to gain such an enormous profit. technology is costly to in building, but not in maintaining.
maybe im not good at any social interaction or dont understand how friends can change us that much so giving out such an respond, but we cannot denied that it really give some people a useful platform to communicate, with instant and funny approach.
Post a Comment