Facebook now has a billion active users, but what does that really mean?

It might have come a little later than expected, and it might have come at a time when the company’s stock is…not doing as well as it should (to put it politely) but it’s worth looking again at what Facebook has achieved – it has created a network of over 1 billion users.

But even ignoring this number Facebook’s other data is simply staggering.  The guys over at Cleverbug, with the creative help of Simply Zesty, have had a look at the data.

Personal

The video reports that Facebook’s users are connected 130 billion ways on the social network and we make 144 million new friends each day. This is something that Facebook is promoting in it own latest (and rather more abstract) video about chairs.

It would take 15 years to read one day’s worth of Facebook status updates – and equally as long looking at the 300 million photos updated to the site each day. Collectively, we spend 175,000,000 hours on the site each day – that’s 19,977 years (500 of which are spent watching YouTube alone – who said Google wasn’t good at social networking?).

Commercial

Not only has Facebook become an irreplaceable social service it has become an important platform for online commerce.  Cleverbug itself allows you to create and send greetings cards to friends customised with their Facebook photos.  While games’ maker Zynga’s fate is irrevocable tied into Facebook’s e-commerce platform (and vice versa).

Oh, and in case you are wondering, if it were a country it would be the third largest (after India and China)