As of this morning, Facebook has passed the 500 million user mark. According to Zuckerberg, these 500 million users are actively using Facebook to stay connected to friends, family, and people they care about. With Facebook being as popular as it is, it’s no surprised they have been able to reach this new milestone, but that doesn’t make it any less important.
To celebrate this event, Facebook is launching Facebook Stories. This is an application that can be used to share your individual stories about the impact that Facebook has had on your life. Many Facebook users have had interesting experiences related to the site, whether it be connecting with a long lost relative or raising awareness for a cause. –
In a video, Zuckerberg goes on to say that he “would have never imagined” most of these stories would come out of Facebook when he started it six years ago. Zuckerberg and his team seem to be very grateful for the “global movement” their users have created and have put up a photo album showing personal Thank You’s from Facebook employees.
Zuckerberg is confident that Facebook will eventually reach 1 billion users. It took them about six years to reach 400 million, which happened about 6 months ago. That’s 200 million users a year. Will Facebook reach 600 million by the end of this year? Can they maintain this ridiculous growth rate? Have they peaked? With the way social media is constantly changing and spreading, it’s hard to tell what will happen.
Tonight, Zuckerberg will do an Interview with Diane Sawyer. This is a major event as Zuckerberg hasn’t done such an interview in about 2 years. As a rule, he avoids high-profile interviews, so this should be an interesting event. Besides talking about hitting the 500 million user milestone, we can assume Zuckerberg will have to answer hard questions about the privacy issues they had earlier this year.
Many users quit over the whole thing. We also have Zuckerberg’s “meltdown” at the D8 conference and the Facebook movie, which have tainted Zuckerberg’s image. While this doesn’t seem to have caused a dent in their growth, Facebook still needs to clean things up if they ever hope to reach the 1 billion user mark.