New Year’s Eve celebrations – and the hangovers that in many cases followed – did not keep people away from Facebook this weekend. The opposite might have been the case, in fact, as a person very much in the know announced today that 750 million pictures were uploaded to Facebook during the timespan.
Randi Zuckerberg, head of marketing at Facebook and sister of its CEO, tweeted earlier, "People celebrated New Year’s on Facebook by uploading a record number of photos — 750 million over NYE weekend alone!"
That’s a stunning number. Flickr fans are sure to point out that the pictures were lacking in artistic value, of course – many of them may have been dark snapshots of frat boys doing keg stands, not well-lit portraits of more interesting subjects.
There’s also the significant question of how many of the 750 million photos were locked away behind the strictest possible privacy settings. Or later deleted.
Still, it says a lot that Facebook’s users were so willing to share their lives, and also that they were so eager to share that the upload-related record wasn’t broken, say, today or tomorrow instead of New Year’s weekend itself.
One last thought: Facebook hasn’t updated its official user count in a while, and this development may also signal that the social network has grown far beyond 500 million users by now.