Who’s on Facebook?

What do my grandmother and I have in common? Other than a bunch of genes and perhaps our love for food?

We both use Facebook. Daily.

Often reported as the most visited site in the US, even surpassing search engines such as Google.com, Facebook has become one of the most popular websites in the world. In fact, it was recently reported as the third largest US Internet company, now being valued at $41 billion USD.

But so who is it that uses Facebook? Once only open to elite university students, Facebook is now available to anyone that has access to the Internet. It’s your neighbor, your professor, your brother, your kids, even your mother. Facebook now reaches almost 57% of the people in the United states, and about 35% of the world. And now that Facebook is translated into over 70 language, about 75% of Facebook users are outside of the US. There are over 500 million users registered on the website, are you?

Taking a look at the make-up of this group of people, we can see that most users are women, regardless of age. For a while, the fastest growing general user age group was between those of 35 to 44 years of age. However, in just the last six months, there has been a quick rising increase in users under the age of 18.

How has Facebook become such an important tool our lives? Why is it so easy to fall into an abyss of endless clicking on profiles and pictures? This networking site is already well on its way to change the way we interact with each other, the way the world functions, the way businesses and companies operate. Why is Facebook important? Because Facebook is not only changing this Internet age, but also changing every single one of our lives.

That is why we’ve decided to take a deeper look into Facebook and try to understand the social underpinnings of this Global website. Our research and analysis strives to explore the widespread popularity of Facebook, the reasons for its success, and it utility in society. How the does the fact that almost everyone seems to be on Facebook tell us something about our society?


http://www.nydailynews.com/money/2010/03/17/2010-03-17_facebook_beats_google_as_the_most_visited_site_in_the_us.html

http://www.practicalecommerce.com/podcasts/episode/896-Who-Uses-Facebook-

http://www.socialmediatoday.com/paulkiser/199133/social-media-3q-update-who-uses-facebook-twitter-linkedin-myspace

http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/facebook_inc/index.html