Facebook Turns a Profit, Triples Members
With 300 million members, Facebook is just behind China, India and U.S. in size.
Sept. 18, 2009 — -- While you were posting vacation photos and messaging your friends, Facebook just became the world's fourth largest "nation."
Pause for a moment to consider that fact. In the last year, Facebook, the social networking site to which you likely already belong, has seen its membership rolls triple in the last year to a total of 300 million members. And if those trends are continuing, Facebook today will add another 3 million members -- that is, the population of a city the size of Berlin, Madrid or Buenos Aires.
Three hundred million members is a mind-boggling number. In terms of population, it would put Facebook on the list only behind China, India and the United States -- and just beyond Indonesia, Brazil and Pakistan. It is almost as big as the entire population of the European Union, of sub-Saharan Africa, or South America. And, incredibly, it is equal to the entire population of the world in the year 1000.
Facebook, of course, isn't really a sovereign nation. Still, one could make the case that at least to millions of young people who visit the site a dozen or more times per day, take their cultural cues from the site, use it as their communications infrastructure to their social groups, and define their self-worth by how they are rated by others on the site -- it is has become a de facto, virtual second country to which they owe a special kind of allegiance.
The cultural side of technology revolutions have a tendency to sneak up on us. We see the tech, of course, but technology by its very nature tends to be personalized, i.e. mass customizable. When you shop on eBay for that special piece of 19th century Limoges china or original "Beatles for Sale" LP, the experience is intentionally intimate and personal. You discover that there are four items for sale, offered at different prices by four different sellers. It is all, by design, the virtual version of walking up to four vendors at a flea market. Only if you look closely do you realize those four sellers are scattered across North America, perhaps even the world.
