Sometime in the next few weeks, Facebook will officially log its 500
millionth active citizen. If the website were granted terra firma, it
would be the world's third largest country by population, two-thirds
bigger than the U.S. More than 1 in 4 people who browse the Internet not
only have a Facebook account but have returned to the site within the
past 30 days.
Just six years after Harvard undergraduate Mark Zuckerberg helped found
Facebook in his dorm room as a way for Ivy League students to keep tabs
on one another, the company has joined the ranks of the Web's great
superpowers. Microsoft made computers easy for everyone to use. Google
helps us search out data. YouTube keeps us entertained. But Facebook has
a huge advantage over those other sites: the emotional investment of
its users. Facebook makes us smile, shudder, squeeze into photographs so
we can see ourselves online later, fret when no one responds to our
witty remarks, snicker over who got fat after high school, pause during
weddings to update our relationship status to Married or codify a
breakup by setting our status back to Single. (I'm glad we can still be
friends, Elise.)
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