4 Million Students Use Facebook

Posted on November 12, 2005

TechCrunch reports that Facebook.com, a social networking website targeting college and high school students, is growing rapidly. The article says over 85% of all college students registered at Facebook use it and 70% of them use it daily, which is very impressive usage. TechCrunch says Facebook is supported at 882 of about 2,000 U.S. colleges (if community colleges are included).

A Marketwatch article says there is a new verb in town called "facebooking" and says Facebook has over 4 million members. But a CNET post suggests that Facebook's traffic could be short-lived. CNET says, "Online neighbors can be a fickle lot. At one time, it was assumed that communities like AOL, Geocities and the Well would be the metropoli of the digital universe. Today, AOL is struggling, Geocities has been subsumed into Yahoo, and the Well is up for sale."

Traffic at Facebook seems more solid than Geocities was at its peak. MySpace and Facebook are just getting going. They can still target services like Classmates.com, a website for connecting lost classmates and friends, and Match.com, a matchmaking website, for additional memberships and possible revenues.