Facebook Reaches the Milestone of 500 Million Active Users

Facebook’s creator and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, on July 21th officially announced on the company’s blog, that the number of global active Facebook users had gone past the half-a-billion user mark. Not only does this fact make it the biggest social network in the world, but also the fastest growing and even able to create its own currency – ‘Facebook credits’. Given that it is the biggest social network in every country, except for Russian, Japan and China, the next milestone of one billion Facebook users is according to Mark Zuckerberg "almost guaranteed" to reach.

Also, according to Facebook’s official blog it has already reached a milestone of 150 million mobile users. Earlier this month at Venturebeat's MobileBeat conference Facebook's head of mobile products, Erick Tseng, had this to say, "Mobile is fast becoming our growth lever. As we begin to continue to expand, we're starting to go into geographies where phones are the predominant way you access the web. Mobile is a way we can get users to be aware of and engage with social services".

To celebrate its international reach, Facebook has launched a new application called “Facebook Stories” which will allow users to share just how their lives have been impacted by Facebook. The company has been publishing such stories on its official blog, however, this application lets all users tell their own stories and others’ posts, filtered by topic and geographic location.

Launched in early 2004, it took the company about 4 years to get its first 100 million users. Now the company ranks fourth among global Web properties in terms of unique users, according to comScore. Although Facebook falls behind Google (932 million), which is very likely to be the first Web company to gain 1 billion monthly users, as well as Microsoft (789 million) and Yahoo! (622 million), Facebook’s estimated annual growth rate - 73 % - surpasses all of those sites. Now around 70 percent of the Facebook’s current user base comes from outside the US.