With all the talk lately being of Twitter moving from being niche to being mainstream, there is one social media site that can confidently boast of already being well-and-truly in that position. Facebook today welcomed its 200 millionth active user, and it has its sights set on the rest of the world’s population.

Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, may not yet be 25 but he’s managed to found a company which is known the world over and used by millions of people on a daily basis. Sure, it may not yet what most people would regard as a profitable company but in terms of sheer weight of numbers it has few contenders.

Zuckerberg announced the new user-milestone in a Facebook Blog post today. Alongside it, he announced a new section of the site called ‘Facebook For Good’ which enables people to share stories of how Facebook has changed the world for good – be it in terms of community efforts or connecting old friends and family again.

Also, as a first step towards possibly becoming a source of philanthropy, Facebook has teamed up with 16 charitable and advocacy organizations to offer gifts in the ‘Facebook Gift Shop’. These gifts, which are of course of the virtual variety, can be given to other Facebook users for a price. But at least the profit from the sale of these non-existent gifts will go to the charities rather than Zuckerberg’s bank account.

ReadWriteWeb takes a look at how big Facebook actually is, with some intriguing results. It’s twice as big as YouTube, eBay, and Skype. It’s also bigger in terms of population than all but four countries in the world. Having just passed Brazil, it has Indonesia and the U.S. in its sights. However, it’ll be a while (if ever) until it overtakes either India or China, both of which have populations far in excess of one billion.

So where does Facebook go from here? It will undoubtedly continue to grow, and at its current growth rate of 5 million new users per week will double its user base in the next nine months. Which is unbelievable. However, the larger it grows the larger the problem of making revenue becomes. Those photos and videos being uploaded every day are surely putting a strain on the bandwidth budget.

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Entry was posted on Wednesday, April 8th, 2009 at 11:44 pm under Internet, Opinion, Social Media.

Read more entries by Dave Parrack.
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