Facebook has 1 billion monthly active users

They could hit 1.5 billion tomorrow if a group of hackers got ambitious. The number is practically meaningless. Unique individual numbers are far lower.

Because let's be fair: Facebook is one of the very few companies that announces active users, with a fairly clear definition of what they mean by "active". At this point they're likely to have more accounts (including unused ones) than there are people alive so it would be silly now, but they've virtually always used the active metric.

http://diegobasch.com/42-of-us-internet-users-have-a-faceboo...

Back in 2008, I created some accounts for fun to see how Facebook worked, began sending out random requests first day to 4-5 people, next day to 4,5 people. On the third day I had more than 40 friends and was in a circle in some other country and people began writing on my wall asking how I am. Lame.

And they don't count non-logged-in users. You have to be logged in and either visit facebook.com, or click a like button.

Hopefully a typo. For reference Africa comprises ≈54 countries depending on who's counting and who counts.

But yes, infrastructure will pose a problem. Will it be specifically so for facebook though? The argument should apply equally to competitors.

And here's another vision for you: I was on the border of Zambia/Zimbabwe which is a refugee camp (known locally as Baghdad). This little 6 year old girl was running around playing in the back alley and she had a toy cell phone that she was pretending to talk into (sauntering and throwing her hair so I would notice). What do you think she's going to buy as soon as she can ? For many people its the first luxury they buy. Its communication, its their future.

Assuming you're looking beyond the simple answer (because they 're not selling a product/service the majority of their user-base will purchase), I'd say they suffer from the lack of agility. Facebook's size increases their effort to implement even the simplest of changes. We've seen how fickle those users are about little changes and future ones could affect the group in negative and unintended ways. I'm sure every change is examined to death before implementation. In contrast, a start-up making changes might lose their early adopters, but could gain orders of magnitude more users because of that change. Facebook, however, already has the user-base. Facebook needs to keep them happy and drastically changing things in the name of profit would probably send people running. Of course not everyone will run and profit might increase, but those changes would have to be time consuming just from an implementation standpoint given their size and now being publicly traded the desire to keep the investors happy.

You can realistically only know a small number of people, and 300 is probably a good estimate for acquaintances rather than friends, over time you add people, remove people, fall out with people etc.

In the first few weeks you add more people than ever, then the curve slows down to 'old' and 'new' friends, in which case the trend slows down as all the people you used to know have added you.

I know that now, 5 years in to my use of an account, I delete more 'friends' than I add.

Not because of privacy concerns, mind you, I just realize now that a lot of the people I added in the early days weren't 'friends', they were just 'people' with whom I had some intangibly vague connection.

It's possible that today, students still do that, but other people don't, bringing the average down.

So, I think the answer here is that as the audience for Facebook has diversified, the average number of friends has settled to a more realistic number.

GMail ~425M Hotmail ~350M Yahoo ~300M

(http://www.email-marketing-reports.com/metrics/email-statist...)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tencent

"As of December 31, 2010, there were 647.6 million active Tencent QQ IM user accounts,[1] making Tencent QQ the world's largest online community. The number of simultaneously online QQ accounts has sometimes exceeded 100 million.[7]"

Definitely beats gmail's 425 million.

http://diegobasch.com/42-of-us-internet-users-have-a-faceboo...

* Implement a policy of not friending anybody you don't know in real life.

* Block any game with "ville" in its name.

and yet, someone has to call the ceasar naked

keep voting down, for me it's karma points well spent

If all they wanted was to make money, then there would be ads all over the place, instead of the few, limited places at the moment (the right of the main page area, underneath comments on pictures, etc.)

In all honesty, I don't see why people constantly complain about the ads on twitter or facebook, do they really effect you that much that you would stop using the service?

Facebook has 1,000,000,000 users now, that kind of scaling isn't cheap, you want a large social network with all of your friends which you can use 24/7, completely free (cost for your internet, etc, aside) and that isn't sustainable without the website making money somehow. Most people aren't willing to pay for Facebook, if that was a viable solution then it would be the Facebook income stream.

Saying "Facebook wants to make money, if this doesn't change, I will stop using it" is the same as saying "The company which runs the buses in my area puts ads in it's bus stand, so I'm going to stop standing in it."

Whether we like it or not, Facebook is now an integral part of many peoples lives, I live in a different country to my family, Facebook lets me chat to them easily and freely, I could send them a letter instead, but that's subject the thievery, loss and costs a lot more money.

So Facebook wants more ads on it's site? Who cares? As long as the key features are still there, 1,000,000,000+ people and it doesn't effect the way you interact with the site too much, it doesn't make a difference in the end.