Love it or loathe it, Facebook has announced it hit one billion users worldwide.
While it seems implausible one-seventh of the entire planet has a Facebook account -- there must be many duplicates, fake accounts used by marketers, scammers, and such — you still can't deny this mere 8 year-old service has changed many of our lives, from communication and information to entertainment and commerce.
To commemorate this huge milestone, Facebook has revealed some interesting factoids I thought I'd share with you (plus a few I've dug up, as well).
Facebook, by the numbers:
• Since it launched on February, 2004, Facebook has clocked 140.3 billion friend connections, 219 billion photos uploaded (since fall 2005), 17 billion location-based tagged posts (including check-ins) and more than 1.13 trillion "Likes" since 2009.
• As of September 2011 — yes, a year ago — when music streaming applications debuted, 62.6 million songs have been played 22 billion times - that's about 210,000 years of music.
• The median age of a Facebook user today is about 22 years old. This is down from a median age of 23 when Facebook his 500 million users (July 2010), and a median age of 26 when they hit 100 million users (August 2008).
• The top five countries where people connected from at the time Facebook reached 1 billion users: Brazil, India, Indonesia, Mexico and the United States (in alphabetical order). Interestingly, the top five countries where people connected from at the time Facebook reached 500 million users: Brazil, India, Indonesia, Mexico and the United States.
• Facebook now has 600M mobile users.
• When Facebook hit its 500 millionth user in 2010, the average user had about 305 friends.
• The unofficial Facebook movie, The Social Network, cost roughly $40 million to make, says Internet Movie Database (IMDB). It grossed $100 million in box office revenues within four months.
• Mark Zuckerberg was born May 14, 1984. That makes the Facebook cofounder and current chairman and CEO just 28 years old. He was a billionaire by 23 years old.
• Mark Zuckerberg is the second youngest billionaire according to Forbes — behind Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz (born just eight days later).
• Facebook went public on Friday, May 18, 2012. After opening at $42.05, the stock saw a volatile day of trading and closed just above the $38 IPO price. At the time of writing this, the stock is at $21.95. I don't think Mark Zukerberg is terribly concerned.
Check out more tech trends and news at Digital Crave