Facebook to welcome 200 millionth user

Zuckerberg, who created Facebook with two Harvard University roommates five years ago, announced the milestone in a post on the official Facebook blog.

"We will welcome our 200 millionth user to Facebook some time today," the 24-year-old chief executive said, describing it as a "really good start."

"We are working hard to build a service that everyone, everywhere can use, whether they are a person, a company, a president or an organization working for change," Zuckerberg said.

"At Facebook, we want to build the best service in the world for people to connect with and share everything that is important to them, whether day-to-day or world-changing," he said.

"There are still many more people and groups in the world whose voices we want to connect with everyone who wants to hear them," he added.

"So even as we celebrate the 200 millionth person and all of you using Facebook today, we are working to bring the power of sharing to everyone in the world."

To celebrate the 200 millionth user, Zuckerberg said Facebook had created a page, "Facebook for Good," for users to "share their stories about how Facebook has helped them give back to their communities, effect change or connect with a distant relative."

Facebook was also partnering with 16 charitable and advocacy groups to create gifts for users to share, he said, with 90-95 percent of the proceeds going to the organizations and the rest to administrative costs.

Zuckerberg, Dustin Moscovitz and Chris Hughes launched Facebook in February 2004 as a platform to connect their fellow Harvard students.

It quickly spread to other schools around the United States and has since blossomed into a worldwide network that has dwarfed rival MySpace.

While the number of users has grown at an amazing clip, the Palo Alto, California-based Facebook, unlike other Web giants such as Amazon, eBay, Google and Yahoo!, is yet to prove how it is going to translate traffic into cash.

US software giant Microsoft bought a 1.6 percent stake in Facebook in 2007 for 240 million dollars, valuing the social network on paper at 15 billion dollars.

(c) 2009 AFP