Facebook breaks new ground and surpasses 1 billion users

“This morning, there are more than one billion people using Facebook actively each month.” - Mark Zuckerberg, via his Facebook post today. This is a huge milestone, which just further solidifies Facebook as the social networking behemoth that it is, which nobody seems to be able to topple, not even Google. One out of every seven people in the entire world, every month, actively uses Facebook now.

Just earlier this year Facebook published through their IPO that they were nearing the one billion marker, saying they were in the vicinity of 955 million active users (although 83 million of them were fake).

Update: Facebook published a fact sheet around the one billion user milestone highlighting other powerful stats such as:

• Over 1.13 trillion likes since launch in February 2009

• 140.3 billion friend connections

• 219 billion photos uploaded - Data was pulled on 9/10/2012, and represents the total # of photos currently on this site – in other words, it excludes deleted photos. If we wanted to include all photos ever uploaded, the estimate we have is 265 billion. Photo uploading launched fall 2005.

• 17 billion location-tagged posts, including check-ins - Includes location-tagged posts as well as check-ins. Data was pulled 9/10/2012, and represents total location-tagged posts & check-ins since launch of the product in August 2010

• 62.6 million songs have been played 22 billion times - that’s about 210,000 years of music - Data was pulled on 9/11/2012, and represents song plays since the launch of music-listening applications in September 2011