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The history reads, Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook while he was a student at Harvard University. Website membership was initially limited to Harvard students, but was expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and Stanford University. It later expanded further to include any university student, then high school students, and, finally, to anyone aged 13 and over. The website currently has more than 175 million active users worldwide.
The hot talked company Facebook has the highest growth rate, and at Forrester we predict it to achieve the same number of registered users as MySpace in Q4 of 2008, or early 2009 given the current growth rates. The widget platform, which launched summer 2007, has had strong growth as more than 13,000 applications have been launched. Please don’t call this the MySpace killer as each of these sites serves a different demographic, with a different purpose, and different tools. Facebook is more of a ‘lifestyle’ play that allows members to connect to each other. I feel that Facebook has a younger audience and clientele with more social outreach needs but some of the innovative ways of Facebook can be excellent tools for business networks as Linkedin.
The recent US election witnessed a sudden and gigantic usage of Facebook. On Facebook, Obama added more than 18k supporters Sunday night, more than 25k Monday night, and added more than 40k supporters on Election Day. That is the largest single day of growth we have on record, if Jennifer Leggio is to be believed for the stats.
- From August 26 to November 3, the site added 20 million users in 69 days, or about 290,000 per day.
- From November 3 to December 18, the site added another 20 million users in 45 days, or a little under 450,000 users per day.
- From December 18 to January 7, Facebook garnered 10 million new members in 20 days, or 500,000 new users a day.
- From January 7 to February 13, the site added 25 million new members in about 37 days, or over 675,000 new members per day.
Facebook growth is miraculous and it has been a consistent for the past few years now. And since a picture is worth a thousand words, here are the same stats in graphic format.
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