Celebrating Facebook's 10th birthday

New Delhi: Can you believe Facebook has been around for 10 years? Wow, what a journey it has been! Ten years ago this week, on 4 February 2004, Mark Zuckerberg put thefacebook.com on the internet and thus changed the way we do social interaction. It has 1.23 billion users – nearly about the size of the population of India. Our social interactions are now embedded in a smartphone, desktop or tablet. Our thoughts, friends, desires, pictures, statues, and likes are worth billions of dollars.ALSO VIEW: Happy Birthday Facebook! Ten years old!While media pundits may be analyzing the social network's past and theorizing about its future, the Internet phenomenon has firmly fixed its eye on the future. With unwavering optimism Facebook is marching ahead into its second decade, flush with record revenue and profit, and an all-time-high stock price.ALSO VIEW: Happy Birthday Facebook! Ten years old!In the last one decade Facebook has evolved from novelty to utility. For a lot many of us it has become the main platform for sharing the photographs and communicating with friends. It has become so deep-rooted in people's lives that people are finding it extremely hard to kick this habit.Clearly, Facebook – once easily dismissed as the next social networking fad – still gives hopes to remain as one of the leading platforms for global social media. But the new age social media is throwing up far more challenges that the company could handle. Some of these include keeping its original base of young users, ad networking, and privacy policy changes. There is a cost to being so ubiquitous, as the company is now facing a slowdown in growth rate as due to the saturation point it has reached in mature markets. Analysts are also increasingly concerned that it is losing its appeal to teenagers. How can a website be “cool” for adolescents, when their parents and grandparents are using it as well? Relatively new services such as Pinterest, Twitter and SnapChat have now become a concern for the company amid the fears that it may follow predecessor MySpace into social networking obscurity. Facebook's demographics is now shifting towards adults, who are use the network to catch up with long-lost friends and stay connected to family and colleagues.Facebook says it has a global total of 1.23 billion monthly active users – nearly half of the global population with internet access. This includes 945 million who use the social network on a mobile device. But some analysts note that Facebook has to shift strategy for an aging user base."People joke that for the teen, Facebook isn't cool when your mom is on it," an analyst said. "I think it's not even your mom any more, now it's also your grandmother."In the United States, nearly 71 per cent of all adults who are on the Internet use Facebook, or 57 percent of the adult population, according to the Pew Research Center. Pew found that while Facebook is used by 89 percent of online adults in the 18-29 age group, it is also used by 60 percent in the 50-64 age category and 45 percent of those over 65.ALSO VIEW: Happy Birthday Facebook! Ten years old!Even Facebook has admitted that the growth among “younger teens” is levelling off, which basically means that a generation of influential users will ditch the site for new alternatives.However, despite all the reports related to the sluggish growth in its young user base, it is still an effective moneymaker. The company's IPO documents say Facebook made $3.7 billion revenue in 2011. Assuming they averaged 700 million users for the whole year, it comes out to be just over $5 per user per year. Recently, Facebook reported profits of $523 million and a 63 per cent increase in revenue for the fourth quarter, beating expectations. The revenue growth came from stronger mobile advertising sales, a priority of boss Mark Zuckerberg. Advertising revenue increased 76 per cent from the same period last year, with more than half of that coming from mobile. "It was a great end to the year for Facebook. We're looking forward to our next decade, and to helping connect the rest of the world," said Facebook founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg while announcing the quarterly results. Indeed, it is validation of sorts for Zuckerberg and his team after a dismal stock market debut in May 2012, with shares plunging due to fears the social network wouldn't be able to make money from members shunning desktop computers for mobile devices. Regarding its future in 2014, Zuckerberg appears to be quite confident. But, not resting on his laurels, he admitted in an interview with Bloomberg that he is “generally not happy with how things are, or the level of service that we're providing for people, or the quality of the teams that we built”. Nonetheless, he is of firm belief that the social media network will chart out a fresh phase of growth this year. Well Mr Zuckerberg will this mean more ads, more mobile apps, or more acquisitions?Here are some interesting facts (Source: expandedramblings.com) related to Facebook:1. Total number of Facebook monthly active users: 1.19 billion2. Total number of Facebook daily active users: 728 million3. Average number of friends that teens on Facebook have: 3004. Percentage of teens that are friends with their parents on Facebook: 70 per cent5. Total number of Facebook friend connections: 150 billion6. Total number of Facebook likes since launch: 1.13 trillion7. Average daily Facebook likes: 4.5 billion8. Percentage of Facebook users that login once a day: 76 per cent9. Estimated amount that Facebook scammers earn: $200 million per year10. Average time spent on Facebook per user per month: 8.3 hoursALSO VIEW: Happy Birthday Facebook! Ten years old!