Facebook Tops 500 Million Users

By JENNA WORTHAM

•  Facebook, the social network created in the dormitories of Harvard six years ago, said on Wednesday that it now had 500 million members.

The company has grown at a meteoric pace, doubling in size from a year ago and pushing international competitors aside.

Each month, Facebook says, more than 30 billion photographs, links to Web sites and news articles are shared through the site, and its members spend roughly 700 billion minutes there.

“This is an important milestone for all of you who have helped spread Facebook around the world,” Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s 26-year-old chief executive, said in a company blog post.

Facebook’s dizzying rise has not been without stumbles. Most recently, the company was the focus of intense scrutiny over changes to its site that encouraged members to make more information about themselves accessible to anyone on the Internet.

A recent survey by the American Customer Satisfaction Index showed that user satisfaction with Facebook stood at 64 on a 100-point scale, which placed it in the bottom 5 percent of the companies covered in the index.