Facebook's Zuckerberg shifts the conversation
With 750 million users, and growth coming at a slower pace than in previous years, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is shifting the conversation to focus more on the amount of sharing on the social network.
In a press event Wednesday to introduce Facebook video calling powered Skype, Zuckerberg shared that 4 billion "things" are shared every day on Facebook, and he expected that number to double year over year. The amount of sharing per person rather than the number of users is the metric to watch now, he said.
He extrapolated that in 10 years users would be sharing 1024 times as many things as they are sharing now. Zuckerberg said the socially enabled apps will be the biggest driver of increased sharing, followed by mobile usage and the ability to segment into groups.
"We are at the elbow of the curve," Zuckerberg said, noting that all the apps built going forward will be "dramatically different" and will make sharing growth exponential in the coming years. He wasn't specific on what those new apps would do to increase sharing, but said that different social experience would offer more ways to share things, including passive apps that share things on a users' behalf.
The company has a massive foundation to increase its sharing footprint. According to Facebook's statistics page, half of the 750 million active users on the social network log on daily. The average user has 130 "friends" and the Facebook population spends 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook.
At this point, Facebook has attracted around 10 percent of the world's population into its circle. The company has clearly not given up on growth, and faced with new competition from Google to cover the earth is electronic social sharing, will not take its foot off the peddle.
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