Facebook releases startling growth stats

Facebook has revealed some recent stats to show how many people are using the site everyday, and as TechRadar notes quite succinctly, "the stats are pretty mind-blowing."

If you ever needed an example of how Facebook has firmed its position as the world's largest social network, here are four: Globally, Facebook gets about 200 billion pageviews per month; the site now has 350 million members (up about 50 million people in only two-and-a-half months); a total of 1.4 million images are uploaded every second; and Facebook users send 1.6 billion chat messages to each other every single day. These numbers were released during a Facebook press conference in the UK. In addition to massive usage numbers, Facebook said one of its applications called "Farmville" is more popular than its rival social networking site Twitter. Farmville is an online game developed by a third-party that lets users farm with friends, and according to the San Jose Mercury News it's used by 69.3 million people per month. Three months ago the app was used by 11 million people per day, but those numbers have climbed to 26.6 million daily users. While Twitter doesn't release official numbers, reports indicate the monthly traffic is estimated to be 18.9 million unique visitors. Farmville is just one of the more than 90,000 applications currently available on Facebook.