Facebook membership surges to 120 million users

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg speaks at Dreamforce.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News)

SAN FRANCISCO--Social-networking giant Facebook got a notch bigger in the last three months, and the company has higher hopes from a partnership with Salesforce.com.

Specifically, the company grew its active membership total from 90 million in early July to 120 million now, said Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, speaking at Saleforce.com's Dreamforce conference here.

"We got more (members) in the last three months than in the first three years of our existence," Sandberg said. She also said the site now has more than 280,000 applications, small Web-based programs that can be housed on Facebook pages and shared with people's contacts.

Sandberg was on stage to tout a Facebook partnership with Salesforce.com by which applications running on the Force.com infrastructure can be presented on Facebook pages. Salesforce.com offers online tools for businesses managing their customer relationships--and an increasingly sophisticated programmable foundation for customized applications and Web sites.

If programmers using the Salesforce.com infrastructure jump aboard, they could bring a significant new business angle to the scope of Facebook's applications, which today tend to be much more about entertainment. That's just want Sandberg hopes to achieve: "By coming together with Force.com, we believe we are about to unleash the potential for productivity in network applications for our users," Sandberg said.

Steve Fisher, senior vice president of Saleforce.com's platform division, demonstrated the partnership by bringing the My Starbucks Idea application from Salesforce.com's infrastructure into Facebook.

Also tooting the horn was Starbucks Chief Technology Officer Chris Bruzzo, who said the Facebook technology will help the company and its customers make My Starbucks Idea more useful and manageable. "Facebook is going to give us that local, personalized relevance," Bruzzo said.

[mrorie]

How does this compare to MySpace? Is FB finally the bigger site in terms of active users?

[NYJester]

Sortprice.com just unveiled a new application as well, this one geared towards online merchants who want to sell their products directly through the Facebook pages, pretty cool idea:

http://www.sortprice.com/facebook_store

[catbutt5]

Uh, huh... and how many of those 30 million new accounts were simply created to send spam or otherwise pester existing members?

[someguy999]

its funny how Google gets all the press abut their app engine.

Sounds like the real platform of the decade is facebook + myspace...

[snackpack318]

And how many of these registrations are fabricated to make facebook appear more popular prior to the partnership with salesforce.com????

That's the real question.

[jamesmuriithi]

A wonerful world. Tahnks to the good Job. The world is now like a village street. Its is easier to meet than not to.

[wishuluck]

I AM NEW HERE SO I GUESS I GONNA HAVE TO FIND MY WAY AROUND HERE. HOPEFULLY, AS I BEGIN MY JOURNEY I CAN FIND WHAT I WANT HERE.

[ronass69]

I cannot access my facebook acc.

[ashtrayman]

ow do i become a member of facebook