Facebook to celebrate 500m users

Facebook  will finally reach the impressive 500 million user milestone sometime this coming week. To celebrate, it’ll launch “Facebook Stories,” a visual memorial to all the ways the social network has changed people’s lives.

All Things Digital’s BoomTown blog uncovered the details in an interview with Facebook marketing guru Randi Zuckerberg last week. She said that while previous announcements of this nature have been about the numbers, this time the company wants it to be all about the users.

That’d be empty PR-speak on its own, but she’s talking about a real initiative: Facebook Stories will be a website within Facebook that’ll sort actual, submitted user stories by location and theme. Theme examples given included “finding love” and “natural disasters.” Each story will be limited to the same number of characters a Facebook status caps out at: 420.

Facebook has already posted a form through which you can submit your own story. If your story becomes popular — that is, if it gets more “Likes” than most — it could be featured among other popular stories.

Facebook reached 400 million users five months ago. This time last year, it had just reached 200 million, and eight months before that it was at just 100 million. The site launched in February of 2004, and has since become the most popular social site on the web.

Source: Yahoo News