After a fair amount of speculation over the past week, it looks like Mark Zuckerberg is finally going to announce that Facebook has crossed the 500 million users mark. He’s doing a rare interview with Diane Sawyer on ABC News tonight (Wednesday, July 21, 2010), which you’d think would be a fitting occasion to announce the milestone.
Zuckerberg doesn’t give many interviews, and perhaps with good reason, if this recent one at the D8 conference is anything to go by. He really looked uncomfortable when being questioned about Facebook’s much publicised privacy issues.
The upcoming announcement is also good timing for the reportedly pretty dark, soon to be released film ‘The Social Network’, which is about the founding of Facebook. In its marketing, the production uses the tagline (which you can see in the trailer) “You don’t get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies”. I doubt Mark will be looking forward to its release.
It looks like Facebook will be marking the occasion with an initiative called Facebook Stories, which looks to be a visual feast centering around the different ways Facebook has changed people’s lives. Facebook has already created a User Stories form for the launch.
This begs the quesiton, has Facebook changed your life? If it has, how? I’d say that, for me personally, Facebook has made it easier to communicate with some people I probably wouldn’t communicate with otherwise, and made it a little easier to communicate with some people I communicate with regularly. However, Twitter has changed my life more. I use it more, I find it to be more fun, and because of this I’ve built a bigger and stronger network of people I communicate with there.
