So 
Facebook has finally hit 1billion users (that’s active users per month) From 1 to 1b in 8 years. Although it is, of course, impressive, anyone attending my presentation two years ago will know that we had forecast this milestone to be achieved by end 2011. So growth is certainly slowing as the chart clearly shows. Other stats are that Facebook has recorded 1.13 trillion Likes, 140.3 billion friend connections and 219bn shared photos since it launched in February 2004. More than 300m photos are uploaded every day and 62.6m songs played.
Monetising these 1billion users is certainly proving harder than expected. Particularly to the 600m who now access Facebook via their mobiles. Today Facebook launched a scheme where you can pay $7 a post to get your status update to appear higher on your friends pages. If anyone tries this on me they will immediately get defriended! One blogger headlined this as “How to annoy your friends and influence people”.
All this hasn’t made too much affect on the shareprice. After the $38 IPO, Facebook sank to $17 a month back before rallying to $23 after Zuckerberg actually came out and spoke to investors. Today they are down at $21.50 again.