The Power of 500…Facebook Reaches New Milestone
What comes to mind when you hear 500?
Whether it’s 500 – 500,000 – 500,000,000 or 500 (insert desired digits)…it is a rather strong number. Five is five from zero and five from ten. Go think about that for a while.
When someone asks you, how long will X task take…your standard answer? Five minutes.
What is the most famous race in NASCAR? Daytona 500 (More amusing stats below).
How many active users are there on Facebook? Well, as of last week 500 million.
We all thought it was a big deal when the social networking giant surpassed MySpace (yeah that was a while ago) then 300 million users, 400 and then now.
What makes 500 million special is that Zuckerburg and his gang now rank fourth among websites in active users…still running behind Google (932 million) (Microsft 789 million) and Yahoo (622 million).
Of course to make a crack at Google’s record, who will probably surpass the 1 Billion mark later this year…Facebook needs to recognize it won’t come without a fight. Also, in a number of countries they are not the leading social network
Zuckerburg isn’t worried, however.
“It tips at different countries at different times,” Zuckerberg told an audience at the Cannes Lions ad festival last month. On the question of whether Facebook would crack a billion users, he said “it is almost a guarantee that it will happen.”
At least he’s optimistic.
I would say Rupert Murdoch was too…so we’ll have to see what happens.
As promised here are a few more stats concerning the great number 500…
Five hundred is also
- many NASCAR races often use the number 500 at the end of their race names (i.e. Daytona 500), to denote the length of the race (in miles, kilometers or laps).
- the longest advertised distance of the IndyCar Series and its premier race, the Indianapolis 500.
- an Italian car, the Fiat 500, or a number of cars in the United States built by Ford: the Ford Five Hundred, Galaxie 500 and Custom 500.
- a name of two different card games, see 500 (card game) for the trick taking game and 500 Rum for the rummy game.
- (500) Days of Summer is a 2009 film directed by Marc Webb
- an outdoor ball/disc game, see 500 (outdoor game)
- an HTTP status code for Internal Server Error
- an SMTP status code meaning a syntax error has occurred due to unrecognized command
- the years AD 500, 500 BC.
- the winning permillage of a sports team with equal numbers of wins and losses. Such teams are often referred to as “500 teams”.
