Facebook Hits 1 Billion User Mark

Facebook has become the first social media network to boast one billion users around the world.

While Facebook has seen the number of users setting up accounts in both the US and UK reach a plateau the social network has still seen users increase in other parts of the world and now has one billion users on the network.

Mark Zukerberg, the founder of Facebook said about the milestone: “Helping a billion people connect is amazing, humbling and by far the thing I am most proud of in my life.”

He went on to say that he is aiming to have the population of the entire world on the social network as his ultimate goal – that would mean almost seven billion users signed up to the social network.

Having a seventh of the total population of the globe using your network is something that has never happened before in history but it has still not helped the share prices for Facebook.

When the company was floated in May it came out at only $104 billion, a disaster in terms of what had been expected from the social networking site.

The announcement of one billion users did perhaps help to raise the price of shares by 10 cents to $21.93 yesterday but that is still only over a little more than half their value when Facebook initially offered them out to the public.

Experts have suggested that a problem with Facebook becoming a public company is the structure at the top of the company.

While it is admirable to maintain a small founding group at the very top of the company, the reality is that a large public company is not usually controlled by so few people and with interests as large as Facebook it has seemed detrimental to share prices to do this.

It has to be considered if the public and other investors are willing to place their hard earned cash into the pockets of only a few people.

What happens if Mark Zukerberg catches a cold and cannot come into the office to make important decisions, or even worse, what happens if he begins to loose interest in Facebook altogether and takes his eye off the ball when it comes to research and development.

Investors are not willing to take risks with their money when these sorts of issues should be ironed out before a company is floated on the market perhaps.

While it was a great day for publicity for Facebook the news that Zynga, the online gaming company that accounts for 14 percent of the revenue created for Facebook, announced that they were cutting their annual forecast.

The company stated that they were at best hoping to break even in the third quarter of 2012 as online gamers spend less and new titles from the company take longer to hit the market.

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Daryn weatherman