A couple of weeks ago, I finally got around to watching The Social Network, a film based on the early days of Facebook. (Although, since it is only about six years old, we could still be in what will considered the “early days”). In the film, you could see the Facebook team watch as the number of members hit the 100 000 mark.
On July 21 2010, we heard as Facebook announced on their official blog, that they had signed up their 500 millionth member. Earlier this week, it was announced that they had reached 750 million, or three-quarters of a billion members. While Facebook itself has not confirmed this, other sites tracking the social network have.
Just to put this very large number into perspective, I have hauled out my math skills and worked out some figures.
750 million is:
- The number of calories in 144 230.77kg of Cadbury’s milk chocolate
- 58794.94 times around the earth if you were driving along the equator
- 975.54 times to the moon and back (at the average distance to the moon, which like electricity and petrol prices, are subject to change)
- There is also an often quoted statistic of how, if Facebook was a country, it would be the third largest country in the world, following only India and China. In fact, the next largest country would be the US, which at only 313,232,044 people, is less than half the size of Facebook.
I could go on and on, but my maths skills seem to be deserting me at this point… soon I’ll start talking about distances between places in The Lord of the Rings…
Remember too, Facebook’s member count is actually meaningful. When I mentioned to my dad that they had reached 750 million, he laughed and said;” well, I’m not one of them anymore!” He is one of those people who signed up, then sat and couldn’t see the appeal. He then proceeded to boast about how he figured out how to delete his profile…
There are also many people who have Facebook accounts but don’t bother to use them, they are also not taken into consideration. Only those people who have signed on within the last thirty days are counted.
It seems like Facebook it just getting bigger and bigger, I wonder however, if it is going to continue and become a new type of internet, or if like other social networks, it is going to fade into obscurity?
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