Facebook hits 200 million users

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Today at some stage, Facebook will hit 200 million users – nearly 3% of the world’s population. It’s another massive milestone for the service, which only hit 150 million back in January. The news means that it leapfrogs Brazil to become – if it were a country – the fifth most populous country in the world.

The news has prompted boss Mark Zuckerberg to make a blog post, asking what 200 million means to you. A video’s been put together, too, which you can see here, featuring a heatmap that shows where Facebook is most accessed – proving fairly conclusively that it’s still an exclusively western phenomenon.

If you’re interested in more about Facebook, then have a read of my article the other day which discussed why we shouldn’t forget about Facebook in all our excitement over Twitter and Spotify.

Spotify signs up a quarter of a million UK users, and 800,000 a million users worldwide

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Ad-supported streaming music service Spotify has managed to recruit a quarter of a million UK users to its excellent music service. It’s a nice milestone for the service which is the most exciting thing I’ve seen in digital music for a long time.

But Spotify isn’t resting on its laurels. On its official blog, the company is inviting users to hassle their favourite bands and labels to join the service. They recommend hunting down a band’s label, cross-referencing it with their uber-list of labels they have deals with, and if it doesn’t match, then asking them to email [email protected].

What are you missing that you want to hear on the service? Go hunt them down, and then tell us in the comments below.

(via NMA)

Internet comes of age – social networks more popular than porn sites in the UK

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Times were, back in the old days when the internet was mainly for “hobbyists,” easy access to vast reserves of pornography was the big seller of PCs and, you might argue, was instrumental in the uptake of broadband. It was in my house, at least. But not any more.

Web traffic counter Hitwise reckons traffic to social networking sites out-stripped that of porn providers for the first time in the UK late last year. Hitwise says it’s all women’s fault, with 55% of social net traffic coming from lady browsers uploading photos of cats to Facebook, and, as a result, they’re spending…

DIGG THIS: Micro-blogging citizen journalism toy Twitter beats granddad Digg in traffic war

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Internet traffic tracker Hitwise has reported a readership boom kicking off for mini-blog portal Twitter, with the number of visits to the “citizen journalism” gonzo reportage site topping that of Digg for the first time.

The graph generated by Hitwise – stolen by us and shown to the left there – tells the story of Twitter’s unstoppable rise, with recent high-profile Twitter events pushing user numbers to new highs…

The UK has gone GAMING MAD – 22 million consoles in use, PS3 dead last

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Gfk-ChartTrack, the Europe-wide sales-counting conglomerate that tracks how many games and how much hardware we’ve all been buying, has sad there are now a staggering 22 million games consoles in the UK.

That’s an increase from January 2008’s 13.5 million, a figure which presumably doesn’t include all our childhood Mega Drives and SNESs that are sitting in mum & dad’s loft. Nintendo sold 2.9 million Wiis between Jan 2008 and Jan 2009, Microsoft shifted 1.4m Xbox 360 consoles and Sony moved a rather poor 1m PS3s, making it…

Facebook hits another milestone – 150 million users

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This afternoon, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted on the site’s blog that the social networking behemoth has passed 150 million users, and half of those check the site every single day. That’s crazy, and made even more crazy by Zuckerberg pointing that if Facebook were a country, it would be the eighth most populated in the world, just ahead of Japan, Russia and Nigeria.

Other than that announcement, there might be a clue in Zuckerberg’s closing paragraph, where he says: “we look forward to offering even more ways for you to connect with the people who matter most”. Facebook Connect hasn’t been explosive in its popularity, so perhaps the company has something different in the works…

Facebook Blog

Related posts: Facebook Connect to help claim more internet real estate | Facebook is… the nation’s most popular thing-to-do on Christmas Day

Facebook is… the nation's most popular thing-to-do on Christmas Day

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Astonishing figures from web stat counter Hitwise estimate that one in 22 of all internet data requests was for a Facebook page on Christmas Day, as everyone used their new netbooks to change their status to read “…is stuffed, drunk and nauseous.”

That’s up 69% from the traffic Facebook managed to harvest at Christmas of 2007, giving the popularity-boasting friends/dating portal a 4.65% share of the ENTIRE INTERNET and making it the…