Facebook has notched up 300 million users and is on its way
to profitability, according to founder Mark Zuckerberg.
The news came as Facebook achieved the goal to be "cash flow
positive" in the last quarter, ahead of its 2010 target.
"This is important to us because it sets Facebook up to be a
strong independent service for the long term," Zuckerberg said in
his
blog.
Zuckerberg said in building new and better things, Facebook's
developers face important challenges that require rethinking the
current systems for enabling information flow across the web.
Facebook claims that its users in 180 countries spend a total of
six billion minutes on its social networking site every day and
that 40 million update their status at least once a day.
Despite this success, Facebook is coming under increasing
competition from micro-blogging site Twitter.
According to figures from internet monitoring site Hitwise,
Twitter's UK traffic increased by about 33 times between February
2008 and February 2009, growing 25 times faster than Facebook in
the same period.
Facebook responded last month by acquiring the social network
Friendfeed, a Silicon Valley startup company which allows
people to see what their friends are doing online and share
content.
The acquisition is part of Facebook's plan to develop a new
service,
Facebook Lite, which will help it compete with Twitter
head-on.