The number of people using Facebook hit the 500 million mark, meaning one in every 14 people on the planet has now signed up to the online social-networking service.

“As of this(22nd July 2010)  morning, 500 million people all around the world are actively using Facebook to stay connected with their friends and the people around them,” Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has said in a blog post.

“This is an important milestone for all of you who have helped spread Facebook around the world,” he said.

To celebrate, the California firm introduced an application that lets members of the online community “tell the incredible stories of the moving and interesting ways they’ve used Facebook.”

Examples given by Zuckerberg included NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen jogging with Facebook fans during his term as Danish prime minister and a US woman using the service to battle breast cancer.

“Our mission at Facebook is to help make the world more open and connected,” Zuckerberg said.

“I could have never imagined all of the ways people would use Facebook when we were getting started 6 years ago.”

Zuckerberg has pointed to Facebook’s unrelenting growth to rebuff criticism of feature changes or privacy safeguards at the website. Americans are increasingly obsessed with Facebook and many young women check their page even before using the bathroom in the morning, according to a poll released last week.

However, a US study released on Tuesday indicates that while people may be addicted to Facebook they rank it near the bottom when it comes to customer satisfaction.

Facebook landed with notoriously despised airlines and cable television companies in the bottom 5 per cent of private companies ranked in a 2010 American Customer Satisfaction Index E-Business Report produced in partnership with ForeSee Results.

“Our research shows that privacy concerns, frequent changes to the website, and commercialisation and advertising adversely affect the consumer experience,” ForeSee chief executive Larry Freed said in a release.

Zuckerberg openly advocates Internet firms releasing innovations quickly and “iterating” with improvements.

“It’s clear that while innovation is critical, sometimes consumers prefer evolution to revolution,” Freed said.

Facebook recently overhauled privacy controls in the face of a barrage of criticism that it is betraying the trust which has made it the world’s biggest social network.

Facebook Factsheet

About Facebook

Founded in February 2004, Facebook is a social utility that helps people communicate more efficiently with their friends, family and coworkers. The company develops technologies that facilitate the sharing of information through the social graph, the digital mapping of people’s real-world social connections. Anyone can sign up for Facebook and interact with the people they know in a trusted environment.

Product

Facebook’s simplified navigation gives users easy access to core site functions and applications. Profile, Friends, Networks and Inbox – pages core to the user experience on Facebook – have a prominent place at the top of the user’s profile page. Facebook applications – Photos, Notes, Groups, Events and Posted items – are displayed on the left side bar, along with any third-party applications a user has added to their account.

Technology

Facebook is one of the most-trafficked PHP site in the world, and one of the largest MySQL installations anywhere, running thousands of databases. Facebook has built a lightweight but powerful multi-language RPC framework that allows the company to seamlessly and easily tie together subsystems written in any language, running on any platform. The company is the largest user in the world of memcached, an open-source caching system, and has created a custom-built search engine serving millions of queries a day, completely distributed and entirely in-memory, with real-time updates.

Platform

Facebook Platform is a development platform that enables companies and engineers to deeply integrate with the Facebook website and gain access to millions of users through the social graph. Facebook is a part of millions of people’s lives all around the world providing unparalleled distribution potential for applications and the opportunity to build a business that is highly relevant to people’s lives. More information can be found at <http://developers.facebook.com>.

Privacy

Facebook has led the industry in giving people tools to control the information they share and with whom they choose to share it. User privacy has always been a top priority for the company, which has worked with such organizations as the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and WiredSafety. Facebook is TrustE certified. Users also have the ability to share and restrict information based on specific friends or friend lists.

Funding

Round one: $500,000 from Peter Thiel, Summer 2004; Round two: $12.7 million from Accel Partners, April 2005; Round three: $27.5 million from Greylock Partners leading the round, Meritech Capital Partners participating, and Accel Partners and Peter Thiel increasing their investment in the company.

Board

Members: Mark Zuckerberg, Marc Andreessen, Jim Breyer, Don Graham and Peter Thiel; Observer: David Sze; Observer: Paul Madera

Employees

1,400+

Users

Over 500 million active (users who have returned to the site in the last 30 days)

Offices

Headquartered in Palo Alto, Calif. U.S. offices: Atlanta; Birmingham, Michigan; Chicago; Dallas; Detroit; New York; Venice Beach, Calif.; Washington, DC; Austin International offices: Dublin; London; Milan; Paris; Stockholm; Sydney; Toronto

Statistics

People on Facebook

  • More than 500 million active users
  • 50% of our active users log on to Facebook in any given day
  • Average user has 130 friends
  • People spend over 500 billion minutes per month on Facebook
  • Activity on Facebook
  • There are over 160 million objects that people interact with (pages, groups and events)
  • Average user is connected to 60 pages, groups and events
  • Average user creates 70 pieces of content each month
  • More than 25 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) shared each month.

Global Reach

  • More than 70 translations available on the site
  • About 70% of Facebook users are outside the United States
  • Over 300,000 users helped translate the site through the translations application

Platform

  • More than one million developers and entrepreneurs from more than 180 countries
  • Every month, more than 70% of Facebook users engage with Platform applications
  • More than 550,000 active applications currently on Facebook Platform
  • More than one million websites have integrated with Facebook Platform
  • More than 150 million people engage with Facebook on external websites every month
  • Two-thirds of comScore’s U.S. Top 100 websites and half of comScore’s Global Top 100 websites have integrated with Facebook

Mobile

There are more than 100 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices.

People that use Facebook on their mobile devices are twice more active on Facebook than non-mobile users.

There are more than 200 mobile operators in 60 countries working to deploy and promote Facebook mobile products

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