Facebook now has 500 million users | Hacker News Reader

Facebook now has 500 million users

blog.facebook.com

35 pointsmcxx29 comments

That is 500 ACTIVE they say. I'd guess they have close to 600million accounts, maybe 650m.

Facebook's user ids are generated sequentially. If you register a new account today, your user id (without padding) will be over 1.2 billion [1].

I also find it hard to believe that 75%+ of people who have -ever signed up for Facebook- would be active in the past month.

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[1] Obviously not all of these are real, many could have been deleted, etc. But we're talking about gross number of accounts, not humans.

They haven't always been globally sequential though. It used to be of the form AAAABBBBB where AAAA was the school ID and BBBBB was the user ID within that school.

I don't know where they started the current sequential IDs from, but it was probably at least 100,000,000, which would have allowed for 3 digit school IDs.

I could be totally wrong though.

Facebook user ids are not generated sequentially.

I'm pretty sure the IDs aren't generated sequentially. Sometime in the last year or so, they started prepending '100000' onto each new user ID. Also, the rest of the new ID format is at least 11 digits long. I'm not sure how they did it in 2004, though.

The figures are amazing. I would love to see some Facebook research people calculate the "six degrees" using their user's networks. What would the average x be in "x degrees" for two avarage users on Facebook?

That's invasion of privacy!

Years ago Facebook had a feature that would show you the shortest paths between you and the person you were looking at. I don't know if they got rid of it for privacy or performance reasons, but it was pretty cool.

A company called Sysomos did a similar analysis for Twitter. Unfortunately their analysis is a bit ambiguous, but it's an interesting read nonetheless. http://sysomos.com/insidetwitter/sixdegrees/

Half a billion is a nice number, but the number isn't what really matters here

Right, what matters is the bigger number, 25 billion, which is what Facebook is worth.

Facebook adds users faster than people are being born. If this growth doesn't decline at some point every person on earth will be on FB.

I'm sure Zuckerberg is already constructing a swarm of SETI space probes with "Like" buttons on them.

Except that most people don't have internet access. Only like 25% of the world population.

http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm

Interestingly, that all depends on how you define "internet access". They say a user is someone who has knowledge of the web and the ability to access the internet. (from http://www.internetworldstats.com/surfing.htm)

However, according to Wikipedia, most people have a cell phone (67% of the world population). I would consider access to the cellular network equal to access to the Internet, since many services (such as Google's) are available to cell users. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_...

Edit: And for what it's worth, I think you can operate your Facebook account fully through just a phone and text messages (but I could be wrong). No need for a full-blown computer and high speed internet.

Unless they're planning on launching an SMS-only service then Facebook might find it tougher reaching the developing world on their phones than the cyber cafes. People without internet access don't have iPhones or 3G networks. Though I just walked past a news broadcast with Facebook's Director of Policy observing that mobile was the key to penetrating areas like Africa...

That's 1 in every 13 people on earth

Subtract China and it's 1 in every 11 person on earth.

That's 1 in every 10 people with electricity.

If we assume that people who live on less than $10 a day don't have a computer, or access to one, or cannot actively use Facebook on whatever computer they do have access to...

  That's 5 in every 13 people who have access to Facebook.

Population and other stats from: http://www.globalissues.org/article/26/poverty-facts-and-sta...

Many people here in Peru don't have computers but they all go to cyber cafe and use their hi5 and facebook account there.

I wonder what their definition of an "active user" is.

I would be curious to know how many of their users have signed in within the last year and how many of those users have more than 0 friends.

Returned to the site in the last 30 days.

How many "apps" does facebook have?

Because the app count should be subtracted from the user count.

I bet the real number of active accounts is half that or less.

    *  More than 500 million active users
    * 50% of our active users log on to Facebook in any given day
    * Average user has 130 friends
    * People spend over 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook

# 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 U.S. Top 100 websites and half of comScore’s Global Top 100 websites have integrated with Facebook

http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics

They aren't going anywhere for awhile, this is exactly why I've spent so much time developing apps JUST for FB.

And are they successful? Do you make money from them (if that's your aim)?

So the average user spends 1,400 minutes on facebook each month - about 23 hours and 20 minutes, or about 45 minutes a day. This figure could be really skewed if it tracks log-in time, not actual eyeball time (although that seems unlikely to me, looking at the daily number), and a lot of usage is probably games, but it's still massive, and, to me, somewhat disturbing.

Still less time than TV (2.8 hours/day[1]), though.

[1] http://www.bls.gov/news.release/atus.nr0.htm

Where are you getting the idea that apps are counted as users from?

The story pretty clearly says "500 million people".

So does this mean this is the year people will finally give up on calling Facebook a "fad"?

Based on real life experience, IMO some people would rather extend the definition of "fad" to include Google and Microsoft than stop calling Facebook a "fad".

So about 1.5 billion have access to the internet, assuming that the 500 million users are unique users, then 1/3 of the internet population is on Facebook. That's the end of the beginning of globalisation for you, now all we have to do is create a global culture and pretty soon thereafter nation states would be part of history like principates.

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