Washington: Facebook is expected to announce this week that it has reached 500 million users, capping a meteoric rise that has connected the world to an online statehood of status updates, fan pages and picture exchanges.
In its six-year history, the site has become the Internet's biggest information network and has turned into a daily ritual for many users. It has connected old friends and far-flung family members, even drawing the unwilling who join for fear being left out.
It has turned many users into daily communications of one-line missives on the profound and mundane. It has helped make and break political campaigns and careers, testing the limits of what users care to share or keep private.
The sheer size of the Facebook universe has captured the attention of federal regulators and lawmakers who are struggling to protect consumers and their privacy.
The privately held company, which still thinks of itself as a start-up, is also learning how to handle the new responsibilities.
"As the amount of personal information shared on social networking sites grows, and the number of third-party companies and advertising networks with access to such information grows, it is important that consumers understand how their data is being shared and what privacy rules apply," Mr. David Vladeck, head of consumer protection at the Federal Trade Commision, wrote in a January letter to the privacy-advocacy group Electronic Privacy Information Centre(Epic).
The milestone will be celebrated, according to the Wall Street Journal, in a public relations campaign with users sharing stories of how Facebook has affected their lives.
To put the membership number into perspective, the population inhabiting Facebook now is close to that of the United States, Japan and Germany combined.
70% of Facebook users are outside the US, and 1/4 of all users are updating their pages from their cellphones.
Now, Facebook is grappling with the growing pains that come with a rapid expansion since it was founded six years ago in the Harvard dorm room of Mr Mark Zuckerberg, the company's chief executive.
"A big part of the challenge that we've had is that we've grown from tens of thousands of users to hundreds of millions," Mr Zuckerberg, 26, said in a news conference on privacy policy changes in May. " It's been a shift along the way, and it hasn't always been smooth."
The firm recently moved its headquarters from University Avenue in Palo Alto, California to a bigger campus on Page Mill Road. But bigger challenges have emerged on the public policy front.
When Senator Dick Durbin blasted Facebook for failing to join the Global Network Initiative to fight online censorship, the firm's policy director, Mr.Tim Sparani, said in an interview in March that Facebook does not have the same resources as Google and Microsoft, which are members of the initiative.
When asked about the company's child safety efforts, chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg noted that Facebook has sought to educate its members but that, with 1,800 employees, it is unable to cover every base.
"They are very much like many technology companies that are about the technology first and growing quickly for an IPO and thinking about consumers and privacy as an afterthought," Mr Marc Rotenberg, executive director of Epic, said in a recent interview.
WASHINGTON POST