Last week Facebook announced that it now has half a billion users worldwide — if it were a country, it would have the third largest population in the world. One in 14 people around the globe is on the site.
It's as big as the US and Brazil combined, and only India and China — two markets the web has yet to reach en masse — are larger. All of this is a long way from Mark Zuckerberg's Harvard dorm room, where Facebook began. And the strapline for the forthcoming movie about Facebook, called The Social Network, is telling: "You don't get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies."
In the six years since Facebook has been active, there have been numerous lawsuits, concerns about its use to paedophiles, arguments about its potential to compromise its users' privacy and — perhaps most crucially — doubts about its value, financial and practical.
After all, to those not on Facebook, it's hard to see the value. The site invites users to create profiles, write regular updates about what they're doing and then connect their profiles to those of their friends.
But our friends are the people we all know already — where's the utility in discovering what they had for breakfast? The answer, in the words of the company's head of European Policy, Richard Allan, is that Facebook has enabled a whole "new depth" to how we connect with people.
Real life
It encourages all of us to show people photographs of our weekends, to see who likes what. So when a meeting in real life takes place, it's arguably Facebook that means 500 million people don't have to bother with silly small talk. "In real life," says Allan, "you have enough time to maintain regularly going out with 20 to 30 people.
"Facebook typically extends your social circle by another 100 people. So you feel connected, in real time, to that wedding of a family member you haven't seen for a while.
"But it typically remains an online way of sharing information about real events." There's a darker side to the social network, however: the recent controversy about a number of tribute pages to English murderer Raoul Moat; an only recently concluded debacle about how young people using the site should be protected from adults who might seek to groom them; and a series of self-inflicted crises brought about by Facebook's repeated decisions to tinker with privacy settings which left some people feeling uncomfortably exposed. Jeff Mann, a vice-president at analysts Gartner, points out that there are "a small number of people who get really angry about the privacy issues — but they're off".
"They've left. The vast majority continues to stick with it and to find it very useful." Indeed, Facebook's problems fall into two very distinct categories: those that stem from being a platform for human behaviour in all its various shades, from the philanthropic to the illegal, and those that arise because it's a business and it needs to make money if it is to survive.
Issues of freedom of speech, of course, quickly get emotive — but Facebook has consistently maintained that people should be able to express themselves, so long as they don't break the site's rules. More worrying, for many campaigners, are companies that look at the site for customer feedback.
And yet most customers who have been contacted after they expressed their frustration in fact say they like businesses that take notice of their concerns. From simple advertising, the site is now increasingly profitable, albeit not on a Google scale. Its 2010 revenue is likely to be around $1.1 billion (Dh4.04 billion) — although that's obviously a sizeable amount of money, this is a site that knows its users favourite films — their every like and dislike.
The information it possesses has yet to be mined, and every attempt to mine it brings with it new privacy concerns. The site already sells against relatively small scale commercial interests: favourite films, for instance, could lead to users being given adverts to buy specific DVDs.
Monetisation equation
Mann's Gartner colleague Ray Valdes points out that Facebook has yet to get the "equation" of monetisation quite right, but they've made real strides in recent months via virtual currency, called Facebook Credits, without alienating a mass of users in any meaningful way. As Allan points out: "We are at the forefront of that massive public debate about how better to do all these things; the debate is around where people's comfort is. A certain amount of openness is hugely beneficial." But he concedes that being at the cutting edge of these discussions can be uncomfortable. Increasingly, the site is focused around allowing people to come together because they are interested in the same thing.
To mark the announcement of the new audience numbers, the site is releasing a number of case studies, indicating the real effects social networking has had on the lives of individual users.
The biggest threat for the future, however, comes not from difficulties in connecting enough new people, or in signing up enough new users. As Mann puts it: "The threat comes simply from whether Facebook remains interesting. It's going to need to continue to reinvent itself. But look at what they're doing with inviting other sites to use Facebook's tools, so people feel they're part of a community wherever they are, look at what they're doing around social gaming. I don't think they're heading for a fall."
People on Facebook
- More than 500 million active users
- 50% of active users log on to Facebook in any given day
- Average user has 130 friends
- People spend over 500 billion minutes per month on Facebook
Activities
- There are over 160 million objects that people interact with (pages, groups and events)
- Average user is connected to 60 pages, groups and events
- Average user creates 70 pieces of content each month
- More than 25 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) shared each month.
Global reach
- More than 70 translations available on the site
- About 70% of Facebook users are outside the United States
- Over 300,000 users helped translate the site through the translations application
Platform
- 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 US Top 100 websites and half of comScore's Global Top 100 websites have integrated with Facebook
Mobile
- There are more than 100 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices.
- People that use Facebook on their mobile devices are twice more active on Facebook than non-mobile users.
- There are more than 200 mobile operators in 60 countries working to deploy and promote Facebook mobile products
Source:Facebook.com
