Facebook's Userbase to Pass US Population Numbers
Facebook just announced passing the 300 million active user mark. In early April ReadWriteWeb asked about the size of Facebook with the answer being - "bigger than the population of all but 4 countries in the world." As of today it's bigger than the population of all but 3 countries in the world and it's gaining on the US. Like any great nation, Facebook is asking it's citizens to pitch in. The company just launched Prototypes - a demo site for members to test early stage beta products. Similar to other lab environments, the company will offer users a chance to test new tools and give their feedback.
Facebook launched a number of new product features this year including the latest Facebook iPhone app, status tagging and Facebook Lite. With the new Prototypes service, the community will have a chance to see early releases that come out of the community's late night hackathons and Facebook developer garage.
As ReadWriteWeb has said in the past, "Whereas MySpace is still a website, Facebook has become an entire eco-system." With the new Prototypes site, Facebook is not only leveraging its users to create new applications, but also crowdsourcing their reviews to improve the development environment.
To access Prototypes, users can visit the Application Directory and filter by "Prototypes" to find new projects. Some of the current Prototypes for users to review include the Mac Desktops Notifications application, search by "Similar Posts", Photo Tag Search and Recent Comments Filter. The project will begin rolling out gradually beginning this afternoon.
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fb is just an amazing site!
What is their definition of active users?
Well, The facebook is gaining popularity day by day because it's application is user friendly and easy to access and It's a great success achieved by the facebook...
I agree someone needs to find out how fb defines an "active user." I quit, wholesale, more than a year ago. Yet the (bad) data I left them is still ready to be relaunched the second I log on.
My guess is I'm among those active users, despite my staunch non-active status.
And this is important because...I wonder what percentage of users are actually using it to wage jihad on the evil west?
I do hope it will be monitored by the powers that be to make sure that it does not happen.