Digital Buzz has a fascinating infographic illustrating Facebook's transformation from a bunch of guys coding a nifty application from a Harvard dorm room to a full scale Web platform with 400 mllion users worldwide.
One stat that jumps out at me:
The average user spends more than 55 minutes per day on Facebook.
Based on that extraordinary level of user engagement, it seems that the missing link for Facebook is still how to make (serious) money from it. Facebook's finances are not made public, but most estimates figure 2009 revenues around $500-600 million. Not shabby for a six year old company that's still under VC ownership/funding...
Nevertheless, they still haven't found the way to convert this amazing level of engagement into the kind of money that an ABC or Google are able to extract. I'm really intrigued to see if Facebook is able to find a "killer advertising app" that taps into all this user information or if it's going to be several revenue sources (virtual currency, apps, advertising etc.). Whatever comes first I guess. Assuming one does of course...
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