That didn’t take long. It was just in mid-September that Facebook said it had reached 300m users (and was cashflow positive, to boot).
Now comes news that the social networking behemoth has added another 50m users just in time for the holidays. With 350m users, Facebook is now firmly entrenched as the fourth-largest property on the web (after Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, respectively).
Having achieved this massive scale, Facebook is contending with a new host of challenges. Foremost among these is how give users effective control over who they share their information with.
Since it was founded on the Harvard campus, Facebook has been organised around “networks” — all the students in a college, or all the people in a town. But as Facebook grew, so too did the breadth of these networks, evolving to networks that covered say India, or China.
As chief executive Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a blog post last night, “some of these regional networks now have millions of members and we’ve concluded that this is no longer the best way for you to control your privacy.” As a result, regional networks are being scrapped altogether.
Additionally, Facebook users will soon be able to choose who sees their content on a post-by-post basis. This move is part of the broader changes to Facebook’s privacy policy, which was first announced in July.
While Facebook says this will help ensure users’ privacy, the company had begun hinting it would encourage its users to share more information publicly, a shift that could give Facebook a public, real time search engine to rival Twitter.
More recently, however, Facebook has begun backpedalling, reintroducing the less-frequently-updating News Feed and making less noise about the importance of sharing user information publicly.
How it will prompt users to reset their privacy settings in the coming weeks, the way in which Facebook pushes users — to share more publicly, or to guard their privacy — will give a strong indication of the company’s direction.
For the time being, it seems there’s no need to fix what isn’t broken. After all, Facebook is already enjoying near vertical growth without prompting users to share their lives with the whole world.
At this rate Facebook will have a half billion users sometime next year. What’s next? Everyone who has electricity?
