Mark Zuckerberg, on the Facebook Blog, yesterday morning:
As of this morning, 500 million people all around the world are actively using Facebook to stay connected with their friends and the people around them.
Hmmm, not so sure that’s all accurate and absolutely true. To be clear, I’m 100% sure that there are 500 million accounts on Facebook. But, I’m also very sure that a big percentage of those are not active. Whatever. There’s no denying that it’s a big, big number. And that for all the brouhouhah around privacy concerns and big-brother page disappearances, Facebook remains the pre-eminent social media empire.

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This good news, is in contrast with the legal wrangle that Zuckerberg is facing from Paul Ceglia, he of fraud charges to the tune of $200,000 in his wood fuel business. Ceglia claims he contracted Zuck to code a web project, and somehow came out of this exercise with a 50% share of a Zuckerberg project, named “The Face Book”. Contractual provisions have since increased the share to 84%, apparently. Zuckerberg’s reply to these claims?
“Of course not. It was all about his website. I hadn’t even thought of Facebook yet. How could I have given him an ownership interest in it?”
The most telling statement in this sad saga comes from Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt.
“Plaintiff’s counsel approached us and offered to discuss ways to make this go away. We declined.”

Meanwhile, in an interview with David Kirkpatrick, author of “The Facebook Effect”, Zuckerberg did not make any big announcements, instead offering some interesting insights:

  • The most engaging thing online is other people. If you’re trying to figure out why your site isn’t performing well, you may want to ask yourself: “How many faces are on my website?”
  • People in larger, less restrictive networks are more engaged. The company has seen an increased level of engagement among those networks that are larger and less restrictive.
  • Facebook is working on improving friend lists. Zuckerberg admitted that the company had not build Friend Lists effectively
  • Don’t expect much to come from interviews. “I’m always most excited about what we’re working on now, but I can’t talk about it.”
  • Daily percentage of active users has increased. The daily percentage of active users (which hovers near 50 percent), has actually gone up over the past year