Facebook to hit 400m users

Facebook has announced that its user base will hit 400 million worldwide users this week as it celebrates its sixth birthday and introduces a new navigation scheme.

Friday, 5 February 2010

In a blog post, Mark Zuckerberg, one of the founders of Facebook, notes that the site had less than half as many users this time last year.

He says that the website intends to celebrate its rapid growth and sixth anniversary by launching a series of new features and products that will help to improve the user experience.

"We've made great progress over the last year towards making the world more open and connected," he comments.

Jing Chen, an engineer at Facebook, followed this up with another post unveiling the social network's new navigation scheme.

She explains that the site has been testing different designs over the last few months and has decided to roll out a number of navigation updates.

These include a greater reliance on the top menu to see notifications, messages and requests and the ability to see more content via the menu on the left side of the screen.

Facebook has also sought to emphasise its applications and games offerings more by creating new links to these.

"We hope the simplified design of the homepage will make it easy for you to stay connected with the people, applications and activities that matter the most," Chen says.

Zuckerberg announced that Facebook had reached the 350 million mark in terms of worldwide users in December 2009.

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