On Monday, August 24, 2015, Facebook hit one billion users logged within a 24 hour period. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg made the announcement along with their new experiment called M, Facebook’s equivalent of Siri, the famous digital personal assistant on Apple devices.
This one billion milestone is indeed a breakthrough by a company that changed how the world look at relationships. Facebook has also changed how we view privacy and this matter has remained controversial and users have to find the right balance between getting in touch and up to date with relatives and friends without revealing too much information that may be used by malicious persons.
On a technical note, delivering a free service to a billion people in 24 hours requires computing and storage resources that are obviously massive. So how does Facebook earn money to pay for all these resources and manpower required to run this free service? Most of it is in advertising.
One should realize that the users of Facebook are its product. The personal profile users provide in Facebook is a treasure trove for marketing people. Facebook can deliver ads targeted to a certain profile of users and thus have a high likelihood of success. For example, an advertisement for wedding services can be shown to women who are engaged. Whether this is a bad or a good thing it is main up to the user to decide.
