As of Wednesday, 21st July 2010, Facebook has reached a number of 500 Million active visitors registered and using Facebook. That is 500,000,000 people. There are more zero’s here than alphabets in my name. To give you an idea of how many people are using Facebook, picture this, the world is inhabited by 6,200,000,000 people and it is largely accepted that about 1/6th the population of the world has internet access. So nearly half of all people who have internet access are on Facebook. Or one in 2 people using the internet are on Facebook. It might not seem the case to us, since nearly everyone we know these days are on FB as it is called with love.

And with so many people being on Facebook and trying to share their moments, it is clear that some people share more than what is required (See – mistakes on Facebook that you would regret ) and not follow any precaution with their sharing (See – Facebook : Beware, we have to be careful, 10 Rules of using Facebook ) but the strength of Facebook is the power of the people in numbers. It gives all of us an easy way to publish our thoughts and lives to our friends. This Social Media is something that has been shown to have tangible benefits, through various experiences that Facebook users experience.

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On Wednesday, Mark Zuckerberg (if you don’t know, is the founder and brain behind Facebook)  launched a new feature in Facebook, enabling Facebook users to share their stories of how Facebook has affected their lives. Listen to it in his very voice below.

As mentioned in the video by Mark, the reach of Facebook in our lives has been deep and in many cases very emotional. A woman’s Facebook status updates from her mobile phone become a lifeline for her and a group of 36 people traveling in Haiti during the earthquake. A recently laid-off man lands a new job by reaching out to his friends on Facebook. After 15 years apart, a father reconnects with his daughter through Facebook.  These are just a few of the hundreds of stories people like us have shared about their experiences on Facebook.

As well as being available at http://stories.facebook.com/, Facebook Stories is also highlighted as a tab on the Facebook Pages of 31 partners. The partner Pages chose the default theme to show on their Facebook Stories tab based on the types of stories they want to highlight for their audience. Do let me know if you share your story on Facebook.