14 DAY TRIAL // Facebook has been growing at a furious pace for years and, if anything, it’s only gotten faster recently. The site is now getting ready to announce reaching the 500 million users milestone and preparing some celebrations and a dedicated site to mark the occasion. The site has confirmed that the announcement will come next week, but is not saying that it has 500 million users already. The figure has been speculated for a couple of months and it was only a matter of time until the mammoth social network reached the record number.
“As we anticipated our 500-million milestone, and we wanted to find a different way to announce and celebrate it.” Randi Zuckerberg, Facebook’s Director of Marketing and sister of CEO and cofounder Mark Zuckerberg, told BoomTown. “In the past, it’s been all about the numbers and milestones and we realized we had never taken the opportunity to celebrate users.”
Facebook will introduce a site featuring some of the most interesting stories of its users, related to the social network, obviously. Facebook has been gathering these stories and has been releasing some of them on its blog from time to time. It will now aggregate all of them and present them in the new site which will go live soon enough. There are about 200 stories so far.
Users will be able to search for them based on their location and ‘theme.’ They will also be encouraged to add their own as long as they fit within the confines of the 420-character limit of a Facebook status update. Stories on the site can be ‘liked,’ it wouldn’t be Facebook it this wouldn’t have been included, and the most popular ones will be spotlighted.
Facebook has also been asking its employees to come up with ways of thanking the users for making the site what it is. The social network announced that it had 400 million users early this year and has now managed to add another 100 million in less than half a year, the same time it took it to go from 300 million to 400 million.