Revealed: The big numbers behind Facebook

Facebook CEO - all about the numbers
Facebook CEO - all about the numbers

Facebook execs flocked to London this week to promote the social-network's first Developer Garage in the UK. While they were there they confirmed just how many people in the UK use Facebook.

The answer: a cool 26 million. Considering the UK population is around 61 million, this means more than a third of the UK whiles away its hours on the site.

In celebration of this number TechRadar, who was at the Developer Conference, has decided to do a bit of number-crunching regarding the biggest social-networking site in the world.

So, for your reading pleasure, here are the numbers which make Facebook tick.

1

This is how many people worked on the Facebook Chat service until very recently. As Zuckerberg said at the event: "Our IM network is maybe the second largest in the world and we have like one guy working on it."

2

The amount of people who now look after Facebook chat, as of this week.

10

The number of Downing Street Mark Zuckerberg visited while in London. He spoke to Prime Minister David Cameron about opening up government data apparently.

70

The original amount of partners for Facebook's recently announced social plug-ins platform, which uses simplified code to make it easier to add Facebook integration to external sites. Two-and-a-half months later there are now hundreds of thousands of sites using this code.

150

The average amount of 'friends' a person has on Facebook.

5,000

The cap for how many friends you can have on Facebook. The reason, according to Zuckerberg: "Most people don't have 5,000 friends in real life."

150,000

The amount of websites in the UK which have used Facebook's social graph plug-in so far, which brings the Facebook Like button to third-party sites.

300,000

The amount of sites worldwide that have adopted the Facebook social graph plug-in.

5,600,000

The amount of playbacks the Nike Write Your Future advert got on Facebook in 24hrs when it was first posted.

25,000,000

The amount of people play games from developer King.com, who owns Tetris and Bejewelled for Facebook.

100,000,000

The amount of 'Likes' that have been clocked up since Facebook lanched its social plug-ins service.

200,000,000

The amount of people who play games on Facebook. A mere 24 different games have more than 10 million views on Facebook a month.

400,000,000

The amount of games played by the 25 million users of King.com in a month.

As for percentages...

10%

The amount of people using the new Facebook integration on BBC iPlayer 3. The BBC iPlayer 3 beta has been available for less than a month and currently 8 per cent of those using iPlayer are using the beta version.

70%

The amount of Facebook users that come from outside the US. The UK accounts for 26 million, Spain and Germany account for 10 million each, while France has 15 million users and Italy has 16 million.

30%

The amount of status updates on 12 June which were about the World Cup.

Marc Chacksfield

Marc Chacksfield is the Editor In Chief, Shortlist.com at DC Thomson. He started out life as a movie writer for numerous (now defunct) magazines and soon found himself online - editing a gaggle of gadget sites, including TechRadar, Digital Camera World and Tom's Guide UK. At Shortlist you'll find him mostly writing about movies and tech, so no change there then.