Facebook now has 500 million users

That is 500 ACTIVE they say. I'd guess they have close to 600million accounts, maybe 650m.

The figures are amazing. I would love to see some Facebook research people calculate the "six degrees" using their user's networks. What would the average x be in "x degrees" for two avarage users on Facebook?

<i>Half a billion is a nice number, but the number isn't what really matters here</i><p>Right, what matters is the bigger number, 25 billion, which is what Facebook is worth.

Facebook adds users faster than people are being born. If this growth doesn't decline at some point every person on earth will be on FB.

That's 1 in every 13 people on earth

I wonder what their definition of an "active user" is.<p>I would be curious to know how many of their users have signed in within the last year and how many of those users have more than 0 friends.

How many "apps" does facebook have?<p>Because the app count should be subtracted from the user count.<p>I bet the real number of active accounts is half that or less.

So does this mean this is the year people will finally give up on calling Facebook a "fad"?

So about 1.5 billion have access to the internet, assuming that the 500 million users are unique users, then 1/3 of the internet population is on Facebook. That's the end of the beginning of globalisation for you, now all we have to do is create a global culture and pretty soon thereafter nation states would be part of history like principates.