Facebook hits
500 million users worldwide
Dominant social media site has doubled its users
By Toni Fitzgerald
Jul 22, 2010
If the users of Facebook were to break off and form their own well-connected republic, that republic would have the third-largest population in the world.
Yesterday the social networking behemoth said that it has passed 500 million members worldwide, representing 1/14 of the world's population.
Now it's steaming toward 1 billion members, which may happen sooner rather than later if its rapid growth continues apace.
The site has doubled its users since last summer, when it had a mere 250 million.
It passed the formerly dominant social networking site MySpace two years ago, and it has nearly five times the users as Twitter.
Right now much of Facebook's growth is being driven by international users, as the site nears a saturation point in the United States. It's currently available in more than 70 languages.
Still, Facebook does have some things to work on.
Privacy concerns continue to be a major headache for the site that Mark Zuckerberg built, and a study out from the University of Michigan this week put customer satisfaction with Facebook in the bottom 5 percent of all companies surveyed, lower even than the IRS.
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