Hey, Over Here, Everyone Plotzing Over Twitter Funding! “Aarrr,” It’s Facebook
by Kara Swisher
Posted on February 13, 2009 at 3:33 PM PT
Nobody, but nobody, releases news late Friday afternoon before a holiday weekend, unless they are trying to do a PR pirate raid on another company.
So it was nice to see Facebook, which tried and failed to buy Twitter, having the moxie to release impressive user numbers for the fast-growing social-networking site just as all the oxygen was getting sucked out of the media room by news that the microblogging start-up got $35 million in new funding and a $250 million valuation.
In a Facebook press release today that arrived at 2:31 p.m. PST: More than 175 million users, with an average of 120 friends on the site; three billion minutes spent daily on Facebook; 850 million photos uploaded monthly; and more.
And, oh, yes: “More than 15 million users update their statuses at least once each day.”
Translation from Facebook founder and CEO Mark “Talk-Like-a-Pirate” Zuckerberg: Aarrr! Yer a scurvy bilge rat, puny Twitter!
Here’s an image of the new Facebook stats page (click on it to make it larger):
