Being on Facebook is serious fun. It's a fantastic way to catch up with old friends as well as make new ones. It's about self-expression and building community. Facebook is a platform, a medium and a killer app. It's contagious, infectious and viral—but in the best meaning of those words.

As 2008 comes to an end, we salute the energy, warmth and incredibly diverse interests of Facebook's 140 million active users. You rock. Your postings, photos, applications and friendships make Facebook the extraordinary place it's become for people all over the world to share and connect.

No matter where you are in the world, you wanted to discover more about Facebook. From Australia to Chile to Germany to Finland to France to Italy to Malaysia, to Mexico to Switzerland to South Africa, "Facebook" became one of the five fastest-rising search terms in popularity. In Belgium, Canada and the United Kingdom, "Facebook" was the most popular search term of all.

You got involved; you get involved: The number of people actively using Facebook more than doubled in 2008. Participation and sharing grew even faster—in a typical hour in December, people posted a total of 900,000 status updates, wrote 1.5 million wall posts and uploaded more than 1.6 million photos.

You explored an ever-broadening range of interests. On our Lexicon service—which lets you look up how often various terms occur in people's postings—five of the 10 most common phrases involved the 2008 U.S. presidential race ("Obama," "Palin" and the like). But other terms in the top 50 included "iPhone," "Batman," "pirate," "Radiohead," "bailout," sports teams and TV shows.

You connected with each other and with causes that matter. There are now more than 52,000 applications available on Facebook. Some of the most popular—such as iLike and Causes—provide innovative ways for you to interact with friends. Whether you're sharing a joke or helping rally people to fight injustice or assisting those in need, you are making Facebook a way to bring out the best in yourselves and your friends.

Here's one statistic that both humbles and inspires us—in 2008, a record 6.6 billion friend requests were approved on Facebook. Most of them deepened connections among people who already have dozens or even hundreds of friends on Facebook. We want to do even better for you in 2009, offer even more powerful tools to share and make the world more open and connected.


Elliot Schrage is wishing everyone a happy new year.