Facebook Thanks Users, Shares Stories

Posted by Shirley Brady on July 21, 2010 02:00 PM

After our Facebook post this morning, the site revealed the results of its 500 Million stories outreach to users. Members' tales and anecdotes of how Facebook has changed their lives are featured (along with a Facebook Stories app) at stories.facebook.com.

To mark the half-billion benchmark, Facebook employees share their thanks at facebook.com/thanks while CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg posted a video (above) and a personal thank you to the Facebook community on the site's blog.

He wrote, "Our mission at Facebook is to help make the world more open and connected. Stories like these are examples of that mission and are both humbling and inspiring. I could have never imagined all of the ways people would use Facebook when we were getting started 6 years ago."

Facebook also released a timeline charting its growth, and some new user statistics.

About 7.4% of the estimated 6.79 billion global population is now signed up to the site. It has taken only five months to add its last 100 million users (versus almost five years for the first 100 million).

Since Febuary, when Facebook hit 400 million users, the average time spent on the site increased by 40% to 700 billion minutes per month, meaning the average user now spends about 23 hours and 20 minutes per month on the site. The average user profile is also more connected (to an average of 80 pages, groups and events) than ever before.

The Facebook Stories project, meanwhile, is featured as a tab on a variety of high profile pages, which Facebook categorizes as follows: