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SAN FRANCISCO
—
Facebook Inc.
on Wednesday issued its own eye-popping status update:
The world's most popular social networking site had
surpassed 500 million users.
And now,
the Internet phenomenon that has transformed how the
world communicates is eyeing another distinction —
connecting one out of every seven human beings on the
planet.
Six years
after getting its start in a
Harvard
dorm room, Facebook said it was aiming to have 1 billion
members, matching the reach of Internet search giant
Google Inc.
If it can
keep up its current breakneck pace, a feat that would
defy predictions from analysts, Facebook could reach
that goal by next year.
"We
all love to dream big around here," said
Randi Zuckerberg
, who handles marketing and is the sister of Facebook
founder
Mark Zuckerberg
. "We are going to take a day or so to celebrate
500 million users before we start thinking about going
beyond that."
The
site's runaway growth is nearly without precedent. Last
summer, Facebook had 250 million users. It has amassed
100 million new members since February alone. Now if
Facebook were a country, it would be the world's
third-largest.
All of
which has lent credibility to
Mark Zuckerberg's
confident assertion that his company could almost
"guarantee" growing to 1 billion active users
despite a recent spate of privacy concerns and
increasing competition from
Google
and others. Facebook defines active users as people who
have logged onto the site within the Past 30 days.
"I
could have never imagined all of the ways people would
use Facebook when we were getting started six years
ago," Zuckerberg wrote in a blog post Wednesday.
Zuckerberg
created Facebook as a place for college students to
connect with one another. Since then it has been on a
tear.
It
eclipsed its former archrival,
News Corp.'s
MySpace, in
April 2008
. Facebook is the world's largest social networking
site, shoulders above
Twitter Inc.
with 105 million users and
LinkedIn Corp.
with 70 million.
The
privately held company does not disclose financial
results, but people familiar with Facebook's finances
said revenue, mostly from advertising, could top
$1 billion
this year, up from about
$550 million
in 2009 and
$300 million
in 2008. It has 1,400 employees at its
Palo Alto, Calif.
, headquarters and more than 12 offices around the
world.
Crushing
the competition has freed up Facebook to pursue an even
more ambitious goal: connecting all corners and crannies
of the world. Even as U.S. growth begins to plateau,
Facebook saw its international users increase 73 percent
in the past year alone, said
ComScore
analyst
Andrew Lipsman
.
Two years
ago, Facebook was available only in English, making
overseas expansion more of a challenge except in
English-speaking countries such as
Britain
and
Australia
.
Under
Javier Olivan
, who joined Facebook as head of international growth
three years ago when the site had 30 million users,
Facebook has encouraged its users to translate the site
into more than 70 languages. Now Facebook is pulling
even or overtaking social networking services in country
after country, gaining traction in
Europe
,
Latin America
and beyond. Some 70 percent of Facebook users are
outside
the United States
.
Facebook
said Wednesday that it has grown to 12 million users in
India
and 6 million users in
Brazil
, countries where until recently it had only a small
presence and battled
Google's
social networking service Orkut. Facebook has lagged in
several major markets:
Japan
,
South Korea
and
Russia
.
Forrester Research
analyst
Augie Ray
cautioned that Facebook would have to tread carefully to
avoid creaking under the weight of so many new users and
exponential expectations.
Privacy
advocates in
Europe
have already begun to howl, particularly in
Germany
where strict data protection laws have also sparked
inquiries into the practices of
Apple Inc.
and
Google
. Facebook is being investigated in
Hamburg
for collecting data on non-Facebook users from the
e-mail address books of active users.
This
week, the
University of Michigan's
2010 American Customer Satisfaction Index E-Business
report gave Facebook 64 on its 100-point scale, a
ranking lower than that of the IRS and in the bottom 5
percent of all the private companies the report
measured, which included airlines and cable companies.
Even
companies that seem unassailable are not, Ray said.
"At
times, it seems that no one can take them on given the
amount of time people spend on Facebook," he said.
"But we used to think that about big websites in
the '90s, and some of those don't exist anymore."
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