Zuck Says More Than 1 Billion People Use Facebook Each Month

Well, it finally happened: Facebook has cracked the 1 billion user mark. This was an eventuality that was obviously coming, but it’s nevertheless a staggering thing to behold. In typical Mark Zuckerberg fashion, the Facebook founder posted this understated note this morning:

This morning, there are more than one billion people using Facebook actively each month. If you're reading this: thank you for giving me and my little team the honor of serving you. Helping a billion people connect is amazing, humbling and by far the thing I am most proud of in my life. I am committed to working every day to make Facebook better for you, and hopefully together one day we will be able to connect the rest of the world too.

The post also offered up a link to a document with some unbelievable stats:

-Over 1.13 trillion likes since launch in February 2009
-140.3 billion friend connections
-219 billion photos uploaded (not counting deleted photos)
-17 billion location-tagged posts, including check-ins
-62.6 million songs have been played 22 billion times - that’s about 210,000 years of music

Numbers aside, Facebook has done something far more important than just sucking in a billion users and generating ad clicks; Facebook has completely changed the way people communicate, stay in touch, navigate relationships, run businesses, attract fans, and on and on. True, there were plenty of social media sites that came before, and one day there will surely be others to take Facebook’s throne, but today is a high water mark for both Facebook and social networking in general.

This is simply something that has never been done before. Let us pause and marvel for a moment before we put our cynical hats back on and start musing about how many of those users, likes, and so on are fake.