50 Interesting . . Facebook Facts

1. Facebook has over 350 million active users. More than 35 million users update their status each day, with more than 55 million status updates each day.^f
2. More than 2.5 billion pictures are uploaded to Facebook each month.^f
3. The average Facebook user has 130 friends and sends eight friend requests per month.^f
4. Among children under 18, Facebook was ranked third in the top 100 searches of 2009, behind YouTube and Google. Sex and porn rounded out the top five searches.^ae
5. A recent survey of 500 top colleges found that 10% of admissions officers acknowledged looking at social networking sites such as Facebook to evaluate applicants. Thirty-eight percent of admissions officers said that what they saw negatively affected the applicant.ⁱ
6. Facebook is not only beating MySpace traffic, but it is also the second-ranked site overall in the U.S. behind Google.^x
7. Americans spend 13.9 billion minutes a year on Facebook and five billion minutes on MySpace.^x
8. In 2003, Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg created Facemash, where he placed photos of undergraduates side by side so viewers could rank which one was “hotter.” Zuckerberg would later turn Facemash into the now ubiquitous Facebook.^m
9. In 2008, a 23-year-old woman named Lauren Michaels created a group titled “I Need Sex” on Facebook. Within 10 minutes, she had 35 members and soon attracted 100—50 of whom she eventually slept with. Facebook has since removed her page.^e
10. An 18-year-old Wisconsin man posed as several different girls on Facebook to blackmail underage male teens into performing sexual favors by coaxing them to send nude photos of themselves. He could be facing up to 300 years in prison.^ac
11. Beacon, part of Facebook’s controversial advertisement system that broadcasted information about a user’s shopping activity on other sites, was the target of a class action lawsuit in 2009. The resulting settlement required Facebook to pay $9.5 million into a settlement fund.^l
12. If Facebook were a country, it would be the fifth-largest country in the world, after China, India, the U.S., and Indonesia.^ag
13. In 2009, an EMT at the crime scene took a cell phone picture of the body of a New York woman who had been strangled and beaten and then posted it on his Facebook profile. He was later arrested on charges of official misconduct and was fired from his job.^t
14. The head of the Catholic Church in England and Wales warned that Facebook and MySpace can lead children to commit suicide because such sites encourage teens to build transient relationships and dehumanize community life.^af
15. Facebook includes eating disorder groups such as “Get Thin or Die Trying,” and “Quod me nutrit me destruit” (“What nourishes me destroys me”). While such eating disorder sites were typically anonymous on the Web, their growing presence on Facebook makes them more public and accessible to more people.^h
16. The New Oxford Dictionary announced that the 2009 Word of the Year was “unfriend,” as in “to remove someone as a friend on a social networking site” such as Facebook. However, there is some debate whether the word should be “defriend” rather than “unfriend.”^l
17. A 39-year-old Pennsylvania father was arrested for openly asking his 13-year-old daughter for sex over Facebook.^o
18. While stressing that correlation does not equal causation, a recent poll suggested that Facebook users have lower overall grades than non-users.^m
19. While initially created for college students, Facebook users over the age 26 now represent 60% of the total U.S. Facebook population.^a

The average user spends more than 55 minutes a day on Facebook

20. The average Facebook users spend more than 55 minutes a day on the site. They use the Like button nine times a month and write 25 comments each month.^f
21. Approximately 70% of Facebook users are outside the United States.^ab