Mark Zuckerberg took to his very own college-grown platform this morning to announce a mind-dwarfing milestone -- over 1 billion people now actively use Facebook every 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.
For those keeping score, that's 1/7 of the world's human population. That's us, our mothers, fathers, and grandparents, our children and grandchildren, our friends and lovers and neighbors and classmates and colleagues past, present, and future, and those annoying jerks who keep adding us to groups and inviting all to events. It's unprecedented.
Facebook hasn't achieved this staggering user base without controversy or conflict, without serious privacy concerns and savvy market moves. They haven't achieved it by being altruistic or sacrificing their for-profit, corporate nature for some higher social purpose. But they've achieved it.
For many people, Facebook is the web, and increasingly, Facebook is mobile. It's where we upload our photos. It's how we send our messages. It's how we plan our events. It's how we game. It's how we shield ourselves from relatives and acquaintances who might otherwise actually think about picking up the phone and asking us how we're doing.
Some of us have killed our accounts. Some of us have gone back. Some have rinsed and repeated that cycle several times. Some of us have found love or civic voice or long lost family. Some of us have been caught playing PayolaVille while in class, or at work, or while covering a major event on television. Some of us have like-minded individuals for chat and comfort and hope, or wrong-minded individuals to rally against. Some of us have tapped on profile pics only to discover, repeatedly, that people look hotter at really small pixel sizes.
But above all, indisputably, it's THE social network.
So cheers on the first billion, Facebook. Try not to spend us all in the same place.
Source: Facebook
