Facebook Hits 1 Billion Users, Would Be World’s Third-Largest Country

Facebook has reached 1 billion users, making the social networking giant big enough to qualify among the largest countries on the globe.

The company’s founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the milestone during an interview with Matt Lauer, which aired Thursday on Today.

“I mean, it’s just — an amazing honor,” Zuckerberg said in an interview taped last week at Facebook’s campus in Menlo Park, California. “To be able to come into work every day and build things that help a billion people stay connected with the people they care about every month — that’s just unbelievable.”

As Facebook hits 1 billion users, it claims nearly one-seventh of the world’s population. That isn’t just faker users or bots, NBCNews.com notes, as company representatives say only active, real users are counted.

The numbers grow even more impressive, the report states:

“Since Facebook launched, the social network’s seen 1.13 trillion “likes” and 140.4 billion friend connections. 219 billion photos are currently being shared, while 17 billion check-ins have been made. Since the music listening app launched in September 2011, 62.6 million songs have been played 22 billion times — that’s around 210,000 years of music.”

Facebook’s 1 billion users would rank it as the third-largest country in the world, just behind China with 1.35 billion people and India with 1.2 billion. Facebook’s user base is now almost triple the size of the United States.

To give some even more perspective of Facebook’s 1 billion users, NBCNews.com points this out — if Facebook existed in 1804, the year the world’s population finally reached 1 billion — every single person on the planet would have a profile.

“I don’t think in the history of the world that there’s been a single medium that’s amassed a billion users as fast as Facebook did,” Steve Rubel , the vice president of public relations firm Edelman and an expert in social media, told TODAY.com.

Rubel said Facebook’s 1 billion users, and the rate the social media giant got there, obliterates the growth rate of any form of media — radio, television, mobile phones — to this point.