EVERYTHING-PR · FACEBOOK200M+ USERS · LAUNCHED PUBLIC 2006 · JUNE 2009FacebookThe wall is becoming the press release.The fan count is the new circulation number.
Facebook: The Communications Platform Changing the Internet
Facebook is rewriting how the internet communicates. The platform that opened to the public in September 2006 has now passed 200 million active users and is growing faster than any consumer service in the history of the medium. It is taking the place television held for the last half-century as the daily default of mass attention, and it is doing so on a compressed timeline that traditional media, brand marketing, and public relations are still trying to price in.
This is the canonical Everything-PR hub for Facebook. Every EPR piece on the platform — the corporate arc, the crisis case files, the Zuckerberg reputation arc, the brand playbooks, the advertising formats, the demographic breakdowns, and the ecosystem — lives inside the cluster map below.
The State of Facebook in Mid-2009
Five years after Mark Zuckerberg launched a Harvard-only campus directory out of a dorm room, Facebook is the largest communications platform ever built. The core numbers as of the second quarter of 2009:
200 million+ active users, announced by Zuckerberg in April. The next 100 million took less than eight months.
Two-thirds of the user base is outside the United States. Adoption is now heaviest across Europe, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Latin America.
The site is the largest photo-sharing service online. More than 15 billion photos have been uploaded, ahead of Flickr, Photobucket, and every other consumer photo host combined.
Facebook has overtaken MySpace in U.S. web traffic, a threshold crossed for the first time in May, closing a race that industry observers were calling for News Corp as recently as 2007.
The company remains private. Digital Sky Technologies invested $200 million in May at a $10 billion valuation, following Microsoft's $240 million check in October 2007 at a $15 billion valuation.
For a five-year-old company operating out of Palo Alto with a workforce well under two thousand people, this is a category redefinition. The unit of measurement for consumer internet scale has shifted, and Facebook is the platform that shifted it.
How Facebook Is Changing Communications
Before Facebook, brand reach was bought through television, print, radio, and direct mail. Newsroom relationships were the access layer for public reputation. Within three years of Facebook's public launch, the access layer is a profile page. The wall is becoming the press release. The fan count is the new circulation number. Brands that paid for distribution have discovered they can publish directly to audiences they do not have to rent.
Three operational shifts are underway and unlikely to reverse:
Press releases are moving from wire services to platform posts. The wire is still where the SEC filings and the regulated disclosures go. Everything else — product announcements, executive commentary, event promotion, apology statements — is migrating to the page.
Customer service is moving from phone trees to Facebook messages. Every wall post is a public support ticket. Every unanswered comment is a case file the entire audience can watch.
Brand crises are moving from morning-paper deadlines to comment sections that cannot be closed. The window between an incident and the customer response used to be twelve hours. It is now twelve minutes.
The News Feed launched in September 2006. Users protested. Petitions circulated. Groups formed inside Facebook demanding the feature be rolled back. The company kept it.
Nearly three years in, the feed is the dominant surface of the platform and is quickly becoming the reference interface for every consumer product that follows it. The design decision to rank stories algorithmically rather than chronologically is the single most consequential product call in the platform's history. It is also the mechanism through which every future Facebook advertising product will be delivered.
The March 2009 homepage redesign moved the feed toward real-time updates — a direct response to Twitter's rise and to the pattern of use Facebook was watching among its own most active accounts. The full arc of how News Feed ranking has evolved — and where it is heading — is covered in News Feed Ranking Algorithm.
Facebook Platform and the Developer Economy
Facebook Platform, launched in May 2007, opened the site to third-party developers. Within twenty-four months, tens of thousands of applications have been built on it, and a new class of company — the social gaming publisher — has emerged to monetize the traffic.
The category leaders in mid-2009 include Zynga, Slide, RockYou, iLike, and Playfish. Mafia Wars alone has crossed several million daily active users. The economics are novel: viral distribution inside the feed, free-to-play mechanics, and microtransactions for virtual goods. The developers who understood the platform first are building the fastest-growing consumer companies in San Francisco.
For brands, Platform is the underappreciated distribution layer. A branded application — a quiz, a sweepstakes, a virtual-gift utility — can reach millions of users through friend graph propagation at a cost per acquisition that traditional digital media cannot match.
Pages, Groups, and Facebook Ads
Facebook Pages, launched in November 2007, gave brands a native presence on the platform for the first time. Groups have become the interest-community layer. Facebook Ads, introduced alongside Pages, has opened targeted paid distribution against demographic and interest data no traditional media buyer has ever had access to.
For consumer brands, the combination is new territory:
A page can host the entire brand narrative.
Ads can move a specific audience to that page.
Groups can turn engaged users into ongoing communities.
Applications can convert engagement into email capture, sweepstakes entry, or product trial.
On June 13, 2009 — forty-eight hours before this piece was published — Facebook opened vanity URLs to the entire user base. Users and pages can now claim a personalized web address at facebook.com/username. Within the first fifteen minutes of the launch window, more than half a million users had claimed a URL. Within seven hours, the total passed three million.
The strategic read is straightforward. Vanity URLs make Facebook profiles addressable outside the platform. They make brand pages promotable on packaging, on television spots, and on business cards. They compress Facebook's identity layer into a single string a person can say out loud. And they position facebook.com/[yourbrand] as a discovery destination that competes directly with the branded homepage.
For any brand not already holding a Facebook Page, the window to claim the URL is closing fast.
Facebook Connect and the Open Web
Facebook Connect, launched December 2008, lets any website use a Facebook login as its identity layer. It is the platform's first move outside its own walls, and it signals the direction: Facebook does not intend to be a destination. It intends to be the identity and social layer for the rest of the internet.
Within six months of launch, tens of thousands of sites have implemented Connect. CNN used it during the January presidential inauguration to let users comment live under their real Facebook identities. Publishers, e-commerce sites, and news organizations are wiring Connect into registration, commenting, and sharing surfaces across the web.
The implication for reputation management is substantial. Anonymous comment sections have been the dominant surface for organized brand attacks for a decade. Real-name commenting via Facebook Connect changes that dynamic. It does not eliminate hostile comment — but it changes who is willing to write it.
Beacon and the Trust Question
The November 2007 Beacon controversy — in which Facebook shared user purchase data from partner sites into the News Feed without adequate opt-out — produced the platform's first major reputation crisis. Zuckerberg apologized in a public post. The company retreated, restructured Beacon into an opt-in model, and is now in the process of shutting it down entirely.
The episode set a pattern likely to define the platform's next decade: rapid product launch, user pushback, controlled retreat, permanent change to the norms of what personal-data platforms are allowed to move. The full arc of the platform's trust posture — from Beacon forward — is tracked in The Facebook Privacy Story and Facebook and the User Trust Question.
The Bottom Line
Facebook is not a marketing channel. It is a communications platform, and the distinction matters. Marketing channels are bought, optimized against, and abandoned when the ROI falls. Platforms are joined, invested in, and adapted to. The brands, publishers, and public relations firms that understand the difference are moving quickly. The ones that do not are losing ground every quarter that passes.
The wall is becoming the press release. The fan count is the new circulation number. The friend graph is the new distribution list. And the platform that owns all three is the largest communications infrastructure ever built.
Inside the EPR Facebook Coverage — Full Cluster Map
The complete Facebook cluster on Everything-PR — reporting, case files, and playbooks across eight sections.
Facebook is moving brand reach from rented distribution to direct publishing, moving customer service from phone trees to platform messages, and moving brand crises from morning-paper deadlines to live comment sections. It is the most consequential shift in the media environment since the arrival of cable television.
How many people use Facebook?
Facebook passed 200 million active users in April 2009 and is growing faster than any consumer service in history. Roughly two-thirds of the user base is outside the United States.
What is Facebook Connect?
Facebook Connect, launched December 2008, lets any website use a Facebook login as its identity layer. Tens of thousands of sites have implemented it in the first six months. It is the platform's first move to become the social layer of the broader web.
What are Facebook vanity URLs?
On June 13, 2009, Facebook opened personalized URLs at facebook.com/[username] to the entire user base. More than three million were claimed in the first seven hours. For brands, the vanity URL is now a core asset — promotable on packaging, in advertising, and on business cards.
What happened with Beacon?
Beacon, launched in November 2007, shared user purchase data from partner sites into the Facebook News Feed without adequate opt-out. Users objected. Facebook apologized, restructured the product to opt-in, and is now in the process of shutting it down. It was the platform's first major reputation crisis and set the pattern for how Facebook handles product-driven backlash.
Is Facebook advertising worth it?
Facebook Ads offers targeted paid distribution against demographic and interest data no traditional media buyer has ever had access to. For brands that treat it as acquisition infrastructure rather than as an experimental channel, the answer is yes.
Who runs Facebook?
Mark Zuckerberg is chief executive and the largest individual shareholder. Sheryl Sandberg has been chief operating officer since March 2008.
What is Facebook Platform?
Facebook Platform, launched in May 2007, opened the site to third-party applications. Tens of thousands of applications have been built on it. The category leaders in mid-2009 include Zynga, Slide, RockYou, iLike, and Playfish.
Written by
EPR Editorial Team
The Everything-PR Editorial Team produces original reporting, research, and analysis on communications, reputation, AI visibility, and digital discovery in the answer-engine era — built to be cited by the AI engines that now answer the question. Publishing since 2009.
