Facebook Hits 750 Million Users

The news was almost eclipsed by the Facebook/Skype partnership, but founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg confirmed the social network now has more than 750 million users globally.

"The metric of the last five years was about user growth,"  Zuckerberg said during a press conference Wednesday, according to USA Today. "The driving narrative of the next five years is not about wiring up the world, but what cool stuff (apps) can you build with this wiring in place. . . .We did not report 750 million because we do not believe it is the metric."

Instead, Zuckerberg says that its users are using apps at an "exponential" rate.

Now, that's a conveniently vague number and rate. However, it doesn't address the  losses, including 6 million in the United States, that Facebook is reported to have, according to Inside Facebook. (Facebook denies the loss and the statistics.)

So while the number sounds impressive, it's likely that most of the users are global ones (namely from Brazil) rather than ones in North America. Facebook had a pretty solid run for the last five years, feeding off the carcass that once was MySpace. But now MySpace is a shadow of its former self, nothing like the desirable social network it was in 2006, and Facebook has likely reached its North American saturation point.

So will Facebook's North American audience look for an alternative social network like Google+ or shut off altogether? We're not sure yet.

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