Facebook hits 1 billion active users

Facebook today announced it now serves a billion active users monthly, one out of every seven people on planet Earth. Even more interesting, Facebook now has more than 600 million mobile users. Celebrating the milestone, CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who started the social networking behemoth in his Harvard dorm room eight years ago, posted a short notice on the company’s blog alongside a promotional clip and a fact sheet with some interesting numbers…

More people now connect to Facebook via the Android app than on iOS, understandable given Android’s commanding lead of the smartphone market. However, even more people connect to Facebook via the web than using mobile apps across all platforms.

Here’s Zuckerberg’s message, as seen on the Facebook blog:

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.

And the video Facebook made to celebrate the occasion.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7SjvLceXgU

Of note, the 28-year-old Facebook CEO called the iPhone 5 in a Today Show interview “a wonderful device” and revealed Apple CEO Tim Cook sent him a free iPhone 5, a courtesy shown only to close partners.

In his first television interview since Facebook’s IPO, Zuck tells Today’s Matt Lauer that he wears “the same thing every day”.

On the Facebook mobile apps vs. mobile web:

iPhone is a great platform. There are more people who use Facebook on Android – because Android is just – more people use it, at this point.

And the thing that I think a lot of people don’t think about is that there are actually more people in the world using Facebook on mobile Web, right, so not using the apps on iOS or Android, but actually just going to a browser on a phone.

There are more people doing that than the iPhone and all of Android phones combined, right? So it’s actually a pretty diverse ecosystem.

Facebook shared interesting stats related to its business growth:

• Facebook ht 500 million users in July 2010, 100 million in August 2008, 50 million users in October 2007 and 25 million users in January 2006
• over 1.13 trillion likes since launch in February 2009
• 140.3 billion friend connections
• 219 billion photos uploaded since fall 2005 (265 billion if you count deleted photos)
• 17 billion location-tagged posts, including check-ins
• 62.6 million songs have been played 22 billion times (about 210,000 years of music)
• the median age of the user was about 22 the week Facebook hit 1 billion users (was 19 when Facebook hit 50 million users in January 2006)
• the top five countries where people connect to Facebook, in no particular order: Brazil, India, Indonesia, Mexico and the United States
Facebook now has 600M mobile users

iDB is social, too, so fan us on Facebook if you haven’t already.

We’re also on Twitter, Google+ and YouTube, plus you can follow us via RSS and newsletter.

For those fed up with the likes of Facebook and MySpace, which admitted defeat by integrating with Facebook, there’s always App.net.

It’s hot, it’s now, it’s ad-free and yes – it costs money to become a member.

Want to take it for a spin?

Use Felix, a nice App.net client for your iPhone.

Another one: Netbot, from the makers of the popular Twitter client Tweetbot