Increases five times since July

Feb 9, 2010 16:37 GMT  ·  By

To say Facebook is growing isn't really news and it's even somewhat of an understatement. The social network has been adding users like there's no tomorrow and has now reached the 400-million-user mark. However, in certain aspects, Facebook has been growing even faster than it's been adding new users and, every week, there are five times more shared items than there were a half a year ago. The number of status updates has also doubled since July 2009.

Facebook has updated its Statistics page and some of the metrics are impressive, even for the biggest social network in history. For example, five billion pieces of content are shared through Facebook each week, five times as many as in July. This is directly linked to the success of the Connect platform, which has been getting great support from major sites across the web.

Even Yahoo has announced a wide-reaching deal to implement Connect features and Facebook share buttons across its many proprieties. The growth would indicate that Facebook's plans to become the greatest hub for news and content sharing is paying off and that Twitter should start to be worried. Coupled with the current change in the privacy policy encouraging people to share more publicly, the growth rate should continue to be high for a time to come.

Part of the increase in usage has to be attributed to the simple fact that the site has added 150 million people since the summer of 2009. Still, Facebook users are now posting 60 million status updates every day, doubling since September. However, the number of core active users hasn't changed that much, as only 35 million people post at least a status update per day, up just five million from July. Facebook Pages are also beginning to be more popular, either that or the social network has changed its definition of an 'active' Page, as there are now twice as many active Pages than there were in December, three million compared with 1.5 million. Still, there are several hundred million Facebook Groups, so, clearly, Pages have yet a long way to go. [via VentureBeat]