The Facebook juggernaut just keeps on getting bigger and bigger. It has just been announced that the world’s most popular social networking service has reached over 800 million active users.
The news comes straight from a statement made by Mark Zuckerberg look-alike Adam Samberg at Facebook’s on-going f8 conference. Yes, in a bit of surprise move, the f8 conference was started off by Saturday Night Live’s Adam Samberg who made up joke features like “I’m not really friends with these people” and “the slowpoke” while announcing that Facebook had reached the 800 million users mark before he was awkwardly replaced on-stage by the real Mark Zuckerberg for the actual keynote address.
Because of Facebook’s exponential growth, this sort of figure was expected, but not this early as Facebook announced reaching the 750 million users mark back in early July. This essentially means that the service has added more than 50 million users in under 75 days!
The 800 million figure isn’t just the total number of signups, these are 800 million active users: users who have logged in to Facebook at least once during the past 30 days. Now that’s a big, big achievement!
Facebook started out as a side project by Mark Zuckerberg (currently serving as CEO) and a couple of other classmates when he was studying at Harvard. After realizing the potential of Facebook, Zuckerberg dropped out of college and turned a fun side project into what it is today the world’s largest social network. It is quite an interesting story, and it is actually the basis of one of 2010’s best films The Social Network which you really should check out.
The news comes just a couple of days after Facebook introduced a variety of new features such as higher-resolution photos, a reworked news feed, smart friend lists and the ability to let people subscribe to your public posts without having to add them.
Today, Mark Zuckerberg is the 14th richest American. According to Forbes, he is worth a whopping $17.5 billion, ahead of folks like Apple’s ex-CEO Steve Jobs and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
Things will only get better for the social networking giant, as the company, we feel, has actually started innovating rather than just reworking ideas from services like Google+ and Twitter.
Networks like MySpace and Orkut lost popularity as quickly as they gained it, but this doesn’t seem to be the case with Facebook.
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