Happy Birthday Facebook!!!

Today marks the 9th birthday of Facebook, a social media giant so ubiquitous that it seems it must have been around forever instead of less than a decade.

Facebook has grown from a handful of users in 2004 to more than one billion active users(as of September 2012), more than half of them using Facebook on a mobile device and more than 4,000 employees as of December 2012.

Facebook was created by Mark Zuckerberg with his college roommates and fellow Harvard University students Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes in a dorm room. It was originally intended to serve just the university's student population.

Zuckerberg originally named it as "Facemash," but, thankfully, the name evolved.

Later, membership included other colleges and universities in the greater Boston area. From there, it expanded to all colleges and universities, then to all high schools and, finally, to anyone in the world over the age of 13.

The statistics on Facebook are staggering, usually measured in terms of millions and billions at the end of 2012:

• 618 million - daily online users.
• 680 million - monthly online users who use FB mobile products.
• 30 billion - pieces of information are shared each month.
• 250 million - photos are uploaded daily.
• 700 minutes - Facebook user spends at the site per month
• 1 million - links are shared every 20 minutes
• 2 million - Friend requests are made every 20 minutes
• 3 million - messages are sent every 20 minutes
• 165 million - Users in United States (most users per nation)
• About 70 percent of all Facebook users are outside the U.S.

Needless to say, Facebook's pervasive presence has its supporters and detractors.

Facebook is either a heaven sent platform for linking the world together or a tool of the devil designed to eliminate privacy and fracture national cohesiveness.