14 DAY TRIAL // Facebook is really playing in a league of its own so any stats from the mammoth social network will be impressive at this point. Its photos feature has been one of the most popular sections of the site since its launch and it's now set a new usage records as 750 million photos were uploaded over the New Year's weekend.
"People celebrated New Year's on Facebook by uploading a record number of photos -- 750 million over NYE weekend alone!," Randi Zuckerberg, Facebook's marketing director, tweeted.
Facebook Photos has proven hugely popular from the get go. Despite being severely lacking in many respects, when compared to stand-alone photo sharing services like Flickr or Picasa, its social components, particularly the possibility to tag your friends, made it almost addictive.
Users preferred uploading their photos to Facebook, despite the smaller sizes and the lack of management features, simply because their friends were already on the site and sharing was so much easier.
Facebook Photos quickly surpassed any dedicated photo sharing service making Facebook the most popular photo host on the web, despite the feature not being central to the site.
Last year, Facebook's founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed that Facebook Photos was five to six times bigger than the competition, combined. At this point, there really is no competition, most people upload their pics to Facebook and don't even consider anything else.
In summer 2010, Facebook was getting about 100 million photos uploads each day, so the 750 million over New Year's weekend, clearly the time of year when the most people take photos and want to share them with their friends, is not such a big bump over the average.
Facebook has been working on improving the Photos section in the past year. Users can now upload and view higher resolution photos and the improving face recognition and tagging features should drive up engagement even more. [via TechCrunch]