Facebook has continued to grow at an impressive rate throughout the year, most recently announcing the 300 million user milestone. According to Facebook’s own advertising statistics though, the company is now beyond 325 million users and continuing to grow. The story has become relatively repetitive at this point: Facebook is growing like a weed and doesn’t appear to be slowing.
The other part of the story that we regularly hear is that Facebook is growing at the expense of companies like MySpace, hi5, Bebo, and any other social network which was once successful. While many industry pundits are looking for the young users to go running out the door to Twitter and other sites, the new trend is that the generational gap is being killed and users of all ages are on the same platforms.
Facebook has been able to pull this off through the use of granular privacy settings and increasingly strict limitations which let you connect to only those people you actually know. The result is that Facebook has the most accurate data about user relationships and is increasingly likely to become the default online identity provider. While I’d be willing to throw some water on the flames, it’s hard to find a negative statistic about Facebook at this point.
The only thing we can say at this point is that Facebook is smoking hot and doesn’t appear to be cooling anytime soon.
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"Facebook has been able to pull this off through the use of granular privacy settings and increasingly strict limitations which let you connect to only those people you actually know."
Very few people (lets call them the man or woman on the street as opposed to the tech savvy social media individuals) actually understand the privacy settings on facebook properly. perhaps fb should publish a guide.
as for only letting you connect with people you know, i am forever getting suggestions from facebook themselves to connect with people i've never met and unlikely ever will. how cool is that? not very…..
never believe the numbers anyone publishes, that is always a good rule.
users vesus active accounts, i wonder what the real stats are?
@mikeashworth
Comment by mike ashworth — November 6, 2009 @ 8:44 am
Might be true but many many people are very unhappy by the unannounced, unwarranted changes that have just been made to facebook.
1.7 million members and growing like wildfire!
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=16210262574...
Comment by Andy — November 6, 2009 @ 9:09 am
This is very inconsistent with compete.com stats on actual use. http://siteanalytics.compete.com/facebook.com/
Too bad Facebook won't publish number of users that actually log on per day, per week, per month.
They just made changes that they say are to engage users more, things such as suggesting we friend some stranger. They are cluttering facebook with this attempt and annoying their users. Their default news feed is really confusing users as Facebook designed it to calculate what users think is important and the result is random mess. I am personally seeing less posting from my friend group. There is a supposed FIX floating around Facebook that has users replacing the news feed with the status feed by the less savy users by dragging the Status Update button to top. All those users are doing the opposite of Facebook's scheme to engage and further isolating messages.
I find it ironic that a company that created and building business based on communications and trying to promote their users engaging in more communication, are mute on addressing groups complaining that are 20% as big as Facebook's largest fan pages.
Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!
Comment by Larry — November 6, 2009 @ 9:18 am
The other vulnerability of Facebook when they cause an uprising from users by making changes that frustrate and annoy, the user's start looking for their own solutions and an education process begins. If that education process leads to users learning methods currently available with Firefox for example, to block Ads, their ability to generate Ad revenue is threatened. While Facebook surely controls the content they send over the internet, they need to be conscious that the application (browser) that displays their content is not under their control. I am not sure their advertisers would have any way to measure how many users just never even see their Ads that freely available tools toss into a black hole.
Comment by Larry — November 6, 2009 @ 9:39 am
I still side with Facebook buying up a bunch of islands and make a country of its own
Comment by Sardar Mohkim Khan — November 6, 2009 @ 9:49 am
Pageviews and time on site are better measures of engagement that sheer users. And by that measure– referencing the 25% of all US pageviews figure– looks healthy to me. At some point, monetization becomes the issue, not traffic growth.
Comment by Dennis Yu — November 6, 2009 @ 10:01 am
feel free consolidate my comments.
App developers should be getting after Facebook when they fiddle with the basic functions such as the News Feed and cause users to come up with all sorts of "fixes" that make sense or not. Many of these "fixes" running viral on Facebook may hinder App visibility. I am seeing many posts related to people can not able get to their favorite Apps or missing posts related to their favorite game. When people get spammed with unnecessary info like Friend added "some stranger" in live news feed, they run for the HIDE button. Apps are accidentally being hidden and people are becoming lost and frustrated. Facebook for some reason decided to trim friend posts to 250 for who knows what reason? People that play games often have many more friends because of the games. That 250 limit is making them disconnected with some game friends.
Go read the posts in the group: CHANGE FACEBOOK BACK TO NORMAL!! .. read the posts of how confused and lost so many are. It may effect your business.
Comment by Larry — November 6, 2009 @ 10:03 am
easy to almost double pageviews by having people check two news feeds.
Comment by nustik — November 6, 2009 @ 5:54 pm
wow.. it. grate network.. because i had a very good experiance in that network as member since
Comment by i am correct in my — November 6, 2009 @ 11:52 pm
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salu2
Ana Maria
Comment by ana maria llopis — November 7, 2009 @ 3:23 am
Facebook surpassing Myspace is no rare achievement. The danger is Facebook allowing too many intrusive apps.
Comment by webhostingreality — November 7, 2009 @ 5:38 am
bulshit, facebook doesn't have 325 million users. i doubt if half of the number is true. in addition 20% at least of the profiles on facebook are either fictive used by scammers (that we set up a group to hunt) perverts and other idiots that either have no idea what they are doing or just forgot their password.
don't believe everything that you are fed !
amit
Comment by Amit — November 7, 2009 @ 11:10 am
in my personal experience yes, my facebook profile is a reflection of the people that i know or have met in real life but those people are not necessarily the most interesting people in the world haha so i'm finding twitter to be more fun because the people there are a little more tech savvy
Comment by dj adelaide — November 8, 2009 @ 2:37 pm
i just quit my facebook account.
Comment by joe — November 9, 2009 @ 9:38 am
i liked so much facebook
becuse i used many social sites but most i liked facebook
all groups update information of aaal categries.
Comment by Prince Ali Khan — November 10, 2009 @ 11:11 am
These users, is it active users, registered users, unique visitors?
Comment by Alex — November 11, 2009 @ 8:43 am