Facebook Facts Hidden Behind Its Face

One film that has been on the lips of many lately is  The Social Network, while everyone knows how this site originated behind the doors of a Harvard Room, there is more behind the face of Facebook than meets the eye. I put together some facts that you might find interesting.

1.) Facebook first went corporate with Apple and Microsoft.

Thanks to the movie social network everyone now knows that facebook started with Ivy League colleges and educational institutions. But very few know that it went corporate with the companies Apple and Microsoft in May 2006. Others in the first round also included Accenture, Gap, Intuit, Pepsi, PricewaterhouseCoopers and the non-profit organization Teach for America, Intel and Amazon. It was only after September 2006 that everyone, regardless of school or company affiliation, could join Facebook.

2.) Facebook has never explained the Term “Poke”

While Facebook explains how “poking” works on its help center, there’s no explanation to be found for the origin of the phrase. The most common definition is a friendly “nudge,” but the more flirtatious connotations cannot be ignored.

As Zuckerberg himself had once responded to a question about what a poke meant on the social networking site with: “We thought it would be fun to make a feature that has no specific purpose… So mess around with it, because you’re not getting an explanation from us.”

3.) The Average Facebook User Has 130 Friends

While the current active official user count now stands at over 500 million, the average user has 130. Facebook’s official stats page and people spend over 500 billion minutes per month on Facebook.

4.) Al Pacino’s Face was on the Original Facebook Homepage

Before Facebook redesigned its Homepage back in 2007, it used to feature a man’s face partly obscured behind a cloud of binary code on its front page.

Dubbed the “Facebook guy,” it was not known who the mystery man was — until recently. David Kirkpatrick recently revealed in his book The Facebook Effect that the image is a manipulated photo of Al Pacino created by a friend and classmate of Mark Zuckerberg.

5.) California is Huge on Facebook

As far as Facebook goes, California (home of Silicon Valley) is the most social state, with an amazing 15,267,160 users in the region, according to Socialbakers. This means that nearly half the state is connected via Facebook.

The next biggest user-base can be found in Texas with 9 million users, but it’s nowhere close to California. New York comes in third with 8 million.