Facebook COO: 175 Million People Log Into Facebook Every Day
2/02/2010 12:34:00 AM
kenmouse
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Last year we interviewed Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. This year we interviewed her again. Notably, this time I brought a tripod with me and didn’t cut off Sheryl’s forehead.A year ago Facebook had 150 million users, and more than 200 million people visited the site monthly. I noted “You realize it’s like 1 in 5 people in the world that are on the internet visit Facebook.” Sandberg replied, joking “So we have 4 in 5 more to go.”
The thing is, they’re well on their way to getting those other 4. Facebook has more than doubled in size to 350 million registered users in the last year. By this summer well over half of all Internet users will likely visit Facebook each month.
What’s more dramatic – Half of all registered users still log in to Facebook every day, says Sandberg in the interview. That’s 175 million people. And that doesn’t include Facebook Connect logins, only those people that visit the Facebook website.
Facebook continues to limit the number of friends any individual can have to 5,000. Last year Sandberg said that users would eventually be able to have any number of connections on Facebook. She said “I’m not going to give you a specific date, but I will reinforce the message that this is coming..we’re not providing that functionality and we think that’s important so we are working on this and we’re working on it currently. We look forward to your having 80,000 friends… 100,000 friends.”
This year, when I noted that users are still limited to 5,000 friends, she admitted “I failed you miserably,” and wouldn’t say if or when the limit might be eliminated. She did note that pages have no limit on fans, though.
I also asked Sandberg about her views on how the tech community should respond to allegations of Chinese government sponsored hacking and censorship. Facebook doesn’t currently operate behind the Chinese firewall, although the site is available in Chinese. Sandberg’s response:
It’s a hard question and everyone knows it’s a hard question. China is an important market, it’s a growing market and there are a lot of people that live there. And so when you provide a service, you provide a great service, you want the rest(ph) of the world to use it. And when you think about our mission, we want to connect everyone in the world. Connecting everyone in the world without China is not connecting everyone in the world. And I think that when you do go into China, you have to figure out how to work with the government, that’s very clear. When you go anywhere in the world, you have to work with the government and that’s poses different issues for different models. For us right now, we launched in Chinese. We are not easily accessible if you’re in China, very hard to access us and we haven’t figure out what our plans would be at. So, we’re still thinking here all the issues. It’s complicated.
I was unable to get Sandberg to give me a direct answer on who she thinks competes with Facebook. But she did say that she hopes to integrate with her competitors broadly via Facebook Connect. They’ve certainly made progress there.
At the end I asked Sandberg what her biggest regret was over her last two years with the company. Her response – “I would still like to see us move faster.”
Facebook’s competitors, ranging from Google to Twitter and just about everyone in between, would probably like to see Sandberg do exactly the opposite of moving faster.
[Via Techcrunch]
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