The Facebook Blog

As of this morning, 500 million people all around the world are actively using Facebook to stay connected with their friends and the people around them.

This is an important milestone for all of you who have helped spread Facebook around the world. Now a lot more people have the opportunity to stay connected with the people they care about.

To celebrate, we've put together a collection of stories you've shared with us about the impact Facebook and your friends have had on your lives.
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We're launching a new application called Facebook Stories where you can share your own story and read hundreds of others, categorized by themes and locations around the world. These stories include:

Today we're celebrating our sixth birthday, and this week there will be 400 million people on Facebook. Just one year ago we served less than half as many people, and thanks to you we've made great progress over the last year towards making the world more open and connected.

Facebook began six years ago today as a product that my roommates and I built to help people around us connect easily, share information and understand one another better. We hoped Facebook would improve people's lives in important ways. So it's rewarding to see that as... Facebook has grown, people around the world are using the service to share information about events big and small and to stay connected to everyone they care about.

For me personally, this has meant being able to remain close and connected to schoolmates, family and colleagues while working hard at building Facebook over the past six years. It has also been especially meaningful to me and to everyone at Facebook to see people using Facebook to seek help, share news and lend support during crises.

Whether in times of tragedy or joy, people want to share and help one another. This human need is what inspires us to continue to innovate and build things that allow people to connect easily and share their lives with one another.

So to celebrate six years of Facebook and the 400 million people on the service, we're doing what we like doing most—building and launching products for people. Tonight we'll host a celebration at Facebook headquarters, and we'll release a handful of new things that will improve people's Facebook experience, including a couple that people have requested a lot. We'll post more details to our blog in a few hours.

After the launch we're going to celebrate with a Hackathon—an event where all of us stay up all night coding and building out our new ideas for our next wave of products for you.

Thanks again for making Facebook a part of your life. Happy sixth birthday to Facebook and our whole community. We look forward to building more things and continuing to serve you for many more years to come.

It has been a great year for making the world more open and connected. Thanks to your help, more than 350 million people around the world are using Facebook to share their lives online.

To make this possible, we have focused on giving you the tools you need to share and control your information. Starting with the very first version of Facebook five years ago, we've built tools that help you control what you share with which individuals and groups of people. Our work to improve privacy continues today.

Facebook's current privacy model revolves... around "networks" — communities for your school, your company or your region. This worked well when Facebook was mostly used by students, since it made sense that a student might want to share content with their fellow students.

Over time people also asked us to add networks for companies and regions as well. Today we even have networks for some entire countries, like India and China.

However, as Facebook has grown, some of these regional networks now have millions of members and we've concluded that this is no longer the best way for you to control your privacy. Almost 50 percent of all Facebook users are members of regional networks, so this is an important issue for us. If we can build a better system, then more than 100 million people will have even more control of their information.

The plan we've come up with is to remove regional networks completely and create a simpler model for privacy control where you can set content to be available to only your friends, friends of your friends, or everyone.

We're adding something that many of you have asked for — the ability to control who sees each individual piece of content you create or upload. In addition, we'll also be fulfilling a request made by many of you to make the privacy settings page simpler by combining some settings. If you want to read more about this, we began discussing this plan back in July.

Since this update will remove regional networks and create some new settings, in the next couple of weeks we'll ask you to review and update your privacy settings. You'll see a message that will explain the changes and take you to a page where you can update your settings. When you're finished, we'll show you a confirmation page so you can make sure you chose the right settings for you. As always, once you're done you'll still be able to change your settings whenever you want.

We've worked hard to build controls that we think will be better for you, but we also understand that everyone's needs are different. We'll suggest settings for you based on your current level of privacy, but the best way for you to find the right settings is to read through all your options and customize them for yourself. I encourage you to do this and consider who you're sharing with online.

Thanks for being a part of making Facebook what it is today, and for helping to make the world more open and connected.


Mark Zuckerberg

As of today, Facebook now serves 300 million people across the world. It's a large number, but the way we think about this is that we're just getting started on our goal of connecting everyone.

Because we want to make it as easy and fast as possible for the world to connect, one of the things we think a lot about is how to make Facebook perform even faster and more efficiently as we grow. We face a lot of fun and important challenges that require rethinking the current systems for enabling information flow across the web.

The site we all use... every day is built by a relatively small group of the smartest engineers and entrepreneurs who are solving substantial problems and each making a huge impact for the 300 million people using Facebook. In fact, the ratio of Facebook users to Facebook engineers makes it so that every engineer here is responsible for more than one million users. It's hard to have an impact like that anywhere else.

We're also succeeding at building Facebook in a sustainable way. Earlier this year, we said we expected to be cash flow positive sometime in 2010, and I'm pleased to share that we achieved this milestone last quarter. This is important to us because it sets Facebook up to be a strong independent service for the long term.

Over time, Facebook will continue to be as strong as all of the connections you make. We'll continue building new and better things to make connecting with the people you care about as easy and rewarding as possible. We thank all of you for helping us reach the point where we are connecting 300 million people, and we hope to serve you and many more people in increasingly deep and innovative ways in the months and years ahead.

Even when you're away from your desktop, we want you to be able to share and connect with those that matter to you on Facebook. We had that goal in mind when we launched Facebook Mobile in 2006. Today, we reached a new milestone with more than 65 million people now actively using Facebook on their mobile devices — a significant increase from 20 million just eight months ago.

As we celebrate 65 million, we want you to be able to take Facebook with you wherever you go. That's why we are continuously making updates to our mobile products and... working with some of the biggest names in mobile to make sure that Facebook is available on the latest devices and mobile operating systems.

Facebook Mobile first started as a simple mobile site in English with a few of the core site features built in, such as status updates and photo uploads. Since then, we've grown far beyond what was then a fairly basic mobile site. We have translated the mobile site into other languages, launched Facebook SMS and deployed a wide range of applications for hundreds of mobile handsets, including Facebook for Blackberry, Facebook for iPhone and Facebook for Nokia.

Below is a quick tour of all of your options for using Facebook Mobile:

Mobile Web Sites
Facebook has two mobile web sites: m.facebook.com, which works on any mobile browser, and x.facebook.com, which is designed specifically for touch screen phones like Android, Palm, iPhone and Nokia. These sites have been translated into more than 60 languages and allow you to update your status, browse your News Feed and your friends' Profiles, comment or "like" stories, and view or update your Facebook Page.

Text Messages
Through Facebook Mobile Texts, you can receive notifications, set your status and send and receive messages via SMS. This service is now available on 52 operators in 25 countries, on any mobile phone.

Facebook Mobile for Devices
Facebook applications can be found on an increasing number of mobile phones; many come pre-installed while others can be downloaded from the Internet. The most recent Facebook mobile applications include major updates for Apple's iPhone and Nokia's N97 and 5800. These applications make it easier to update your status, share photos, browse your News Feed and keep in contact with all your friends on Facebook wherever you are.

Also available are Facebook applications from INQ, HTC, LG Electronics, Motorola, Palm, RIM, Samsung and Sony Ericsson. There are also Facebook applications for the T-Mobile Sidekick and phones powered by Microsoft's Windows Mobile.

Facebook Connect for Mobile Web
Beginning today, you'll start to see Facebook Connect available on some of your mobile sites and applications, just as you would on the Web. Already, Facebook Connect makes it easier for you to take your online identity with you all over the Web, share what you do online with your friends and stay updated on what they're doing. Soon, you'll see prompts for Facebook Connect on mobile sites and applications and have the opportunity to take your Facebook profile information, friends and privacy preferences to your favorite mobile applications, as well.

If you're a developer and want to build social applications, learn more about Facebook Connect for Mobile Web here.

Whether you want to use an application, the mobile site or SMS, you can always learn more about all Facebook Mobile services here.


Henri and the rest of the mobile team are working on helping you access Facebook on any phone wherever you are.

As of today, 250 million people are using Facebook to stay updated on what's happening around them and share with the people in their lives. The rapid pace of our growth is humbling and exciting for us, and it affirms that people everywhere are realizing the power of staying connected to everything they care about on Facebook.

From the beginning, Facebook hasn't been about building a website. Facebook is about all of the people using it and all of the things that are important to you. The 250 million of you on Facebook today are what gives... Facebook life and makes the site meaningful to everyone using it, so we thank you.

Each person who joins makes Facebook better by adding a presence to the site that friends and family can connect with and feel closer to. For us, growing to 250 million users isn't just an impressive number; it is a mark of how many personal connections all of you have made, and how far we at Facebook have to go to extend the power of connection to the billions of people around the world.

So today as we celebrate our 250 millionth user, we are also continuing to develop Facebook to serve as many people in the world in the most effective way possible. This means reaching out to everyone across the world and making products that serve all of you, wherever you are—whether through Facebook Connect, new mobile products and the other things that we are building. We're grateful to have all of you with us, and we look forward to helping connect the next quarter billion people on Facebook.

Since moving our headquarters to another location in Palo Alto, Calif., a couple weeks ago, we've been surprised by the level of interest in our new offices. So we wanted to share our thinking in designing the space to give you a better understanding of what Facebook is all about.

The approach our team of designers, architects and in-house advisory board took in creating our new home is similar to our approach in building the product. We see both as works in progress that require constant adaptation. Just as people make the space on the website... their own, we've opted to do the same with our physical space. We've left a lot of the walls white and the spaces unfinished to encourage employees to add the finishing touches.

Our open floor plan matches our relatively flat structure as an organization. We believe good ideas can come from everywhere. Unlike most companies, we don't have offices or cubicles. Instead, people and teams are seated close together so they can collaborate easily. All of the executives are seated in central areas where they are accessible to all employees.

Before and after of the orange crane

We will welcome our 200 millionth active user to Facebook some time today, and I want to take this opportunity to describe what this means to us and what we hope it can mean for everyone using Facebook.

When we built Facebook in 2004, our goal was to create a richer, faster way for people to share information about what was happening around them. We thought that giving people better tools to communicate would help them better understand the world, which would then give them even greater power to change the world.

Creating channels between people... who want to work together towards change has always been one of the ways that social movements push the world forward and make it better. Both U.S. President Barack Obama and French President Nicholas Sarkozy have used Facebook as a way to organize their supporters. From the protests against the Colombian FARC, a 40-year old terrorist organization, to fighting oppressive, fringe groups in India, people use Facebook as a platform to build connections and organize action.

More broadly, technology has made it easier and faster for people across the world to share more and more -- from the daily activities of their lives to events that impact their communities. At Facebook, we want to build the best service in the world for people to connect with and share everything that is important to them, whether day-to-day or world-changing. A heat map of our growth since 2004 shows how quickly people across the world are connecting on Facebook.



Growing rapidly to 200 million users is a really good start, but we've always known that in order for Facebook to help people represent everything that is happening in their world, everyone needs to have a voice. This is why we are working hard to build a service that everyone, everywhere can use, whether they are a person, a company, a president or an organization working for change.

To celebrate and support all of these voices and their potential to improve the world, we are creating a space on Facebook where people can share their stories about how Facebook has helped them give back to their communities, effect change or connect with a distant relative. We've also worked with 16 charitable and advocacy organizations to create gifts that are now available in our gift shop. The organization the gift represents will receive between 90 percent to 95 percent of the cost of the gift, after administrative expenses for the transaction, so we encourage you to share your passion for a cause with your friends and in doing so, support the cause. Facebook will not keep any part of your contribution.

There are still many more people and groups in the world whose voices we want to connect with everyone who wants to hear them. So even as we celebrate the 200 millionth person and all of you using Facebook today, we are working to bring the power of sharing to everyone in the world.