Facebook Gets to 500 million and Beyond

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Alex White

22 July, 2010

According to Facebook, more than 30 billion photographs, links to Web sites and news articles are shared by the users every month. The time spent on the site is around 700 billion minutes.

THE SOCIAL networking giant, Facebook has crossed 500 million mark that it was expecting to achieve this week.

“This is an important milestone for all of you who have helped spread Facebook around the world,” Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s 26-year-old chief executive, said on a company’s blog.

According to Facebook, more than 30 billion photographs, links to Web sites and news articles are shared by the users every month. The time spent on the site is around 700 billion minutes.

Though it’s a time to celebrate but Facebook has some areas which it has targeted.

There is a vast scope in the Asia region where it has been catching up its rival Orkut. As long as Facebook was limited to certain languages it has not shown a good growth rate. But the moment it rolled out the site translated in various European language and native language of many nations, it was received with pleasure.

"Penetration (of Facebook into regional Internet markets) is highest in North America, at 69 per cent, and Middle East-Africa, at 67 per cent, and still pretty high in Latin America (58 per cent) and Europe (57 per cent)," explained Andrew Lipsman, senior director of industry analysis at traffic firm ComScore. "But there is still a lot of room for growth in Asia-Pacific, which currently has just 17 per cent market penetration."

There are some issues like its US like privacy policies which doesn’t suit all the countries. Germany has problems with it so has Russia and china. Brazil is a big nation where Orkut has the largest penetration. If Facebook aims to grab a sizeable user chunk it will have to look into privacy policy and native language support.

Ray Valdes, an analyst at the research firm Gartner, who estimates that Facebook is adding 50 million new members each month, attributed the company’s rapid ascension to its continuous effort to change and improve the service.

“That keeps it bubbling away,” he said.