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Facebook to celebrate 500mn users with ‘Facebook Stories’
by Sophie Anderson - July 18, 2010 - 1 comments
The 500 million user mark will be a pretty impressive achievement for Facebook given its various fumbles with privacy issues.
Attaining half-a-billion users is an astounding number by any standards, and the world's most popular social networking site, Facebook, seems to have accomplished this feat.
Grapevine has it that an official announcement of the accomplishment of the impressive 500 million user milestone is expected sometime this coming week.
Growing phenomenally
The Palo Alto, California based site, which also has Dublin, Ireland as headquarters for Europe, Africa and Middle East, has already sent out an internal email celebrating the news.
Launched in February of 2004, the sites popularity and membership has risen by leaps and bounds.
In July last year, it had only 200 million users. Facebook has doubled its subscriber base to reach 400 million users earlier this year.
Barely six months down the line, the company is talking of 500 million.
“In the past, it’s been all about the numbers and milestones and we realized we had never taken the opportunity to celebrate users,” averred Zuckerberg.
Bets are on when the site would clock the magical one billion mark.
'Facebook Stories' to be unveiled
The company also intends to mark the occasion of the announcement regarding 500 million users with a new consumer marketing initiative called “Facebook Stories.”
Facebook Stories will be a collection, within Facebook, of real, user submitted stories sorted by location and by theme. Each story will have a maximum of 420 characters.
Some of the themes that Facebook has chosen are "finding love," "natural disasters," and “coping with grief.”
“As we anticipated our 500-million milestone, and we wanted to find a different way to announce and celebrate it,” said Facebook marketing guru Randi Zuckerberg in an interview to the All Things Digital's BoomTown blog.
“In the past, it’s been all about the numbers and milestones and we realized we had never taken the opportunity to celebrate users,” averred Zuckerberg.
Facebook has uploaded a form which can be used by users to submit a story.
If the story is admired, it could be featured among other popular stories.
To achieve that end, Facebook will be optimized for the other devices, such as the Apple iPad and Amazon Kindle.
Facebook has identified close to 200 such text stories. The site is now in the process of seeking permission from users to feature them.
“We really think by surfacing these stories, users can explain what Facebook is a lot better than we can,” said Zuckerberg.
Sources familiar with the matter aver that the social networking site will also roll out the new tab designs for its website on Aug. 1, 2010, in all probability, immediately after the “500 million users” proclamation is made.
Comments
Facebook has been currently blocking thousands of users for adding people that have been suggesting to us as friends as well as adding family members, and people that we do indeed know. They have also been warning and blocking people for accepting friend requests as well.
This is done by an automated system devised by Caroline Ghiossi from user operations as an anti-spam tool that supposedly detects the speed and frequency to which you add and accept requests regardless of who those people are. It doesn't tell you when the block is lifted nor do they tell you the limit to which you can add or accept friend requests. Here is the facebook page that addresses this issue. It is now at 3,000 and growing. Facebook has refused to address this problem and we need somebody to have them answer for it!!!
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