If there's any doubt that Facebook is rapidly becoming the next big thing in social networks, you only need look at their recent statistics. According to new reports, in recent weeks Facebook is growing at a rate of 600,000 users each day, up from 300,000 to 400,000 users per day earlier this quarter. The company is also reporting that, as of today, they have reached 140 million active users. ]]>
The new data being reported on Inside Facebook is based on their estimations, and not any actual release from the company. That being said, the Inside Facebook site notes that the 600,000 users per day is only a roundabout number - the true number could possibly be even higher: perhaps even as high as 700,000 users per day.
If Facebook continues at this rate, by the end of December they could add a total of 20 million new users. By March, the company could then reach 200 million active users - which would mean they doubled their userbase in less than a year's time. The majority of this growth (70%) is taking place outside the U.S.
To handle this growth, a poster on Slashdot notes that "the Facebook engineering team has been tweaking its use of memcached, and says it can now handle 200,000 UDP requests per second. Facebook has detailed its refinements to memcached, which it hopes will be included in the official memcached repository. For now, their changes have been released to github."
Facebook's Users Are Active and Engaged
Facebook did release some figures of their own today that show their users are actively using the site and engaged with the content. Here's what they reported:
General Growth
- More than 140 million active users
- More than half of Facebook users are outside of college
- The fastest growing demographic is those 25 years old and older
User Engagement
- Average user has 100 friends on the site
- 2.6 billion minutes are spent on Facebook each day (worldwide)
- More than 13 million users update their statuses at least once each day
- More than 2.5 million users become fans of Pages each day
Applications
- More than 700 million photos uploaded to the site each month
- More than 4 million videos uploaded each month
- More than 15 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) shared each month
- More than 2 million events created each month
- More than 19 million active user groups exist on the site
International Growth
- More than 35 translations available on the site, with more than 60 in development
- More than 70% of Facebook users are outside the United States
Platform
- More than 660,000 developers and entrepreneurs from more than 180 countries
- More than 52,000 applications currently available on Facebook Platform
- 140 new applications added per day
- More than 95% of Facebook members have used at least one application built on Facebook Platform
Also worth noting is the data on mobile users released last month which revealed that the company has 15 million active mobile users using their site, having grown from only 5 million at the beginning of the year. Those aren't additional users, but are a subset of the 140 million who use the site from their mobile phones and other devices. We can't help but think those numbers were also aided by the September launch of Facebook's iPhone app, version 2.0. The new release, a huge improvement over the original, managed to pack in nearly every feature from social network including wall posts, status updates, the news feed, photos and more, all from the simplified iPhone interface.
How to Get More Stats
If you like delving into statistics or are just looking for specific information on Facebook demographics, the AllFacebook site has a pretty handy online tool available. With it, you can use drop-down boxes to select country, gender, and age range and have the tool chart that data on the screen for you. You can compare up to three companies using this tool.
Image credits: top chart, Inside Facebook; bottom chart, AllFacebook
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