Facebook has topped 1 billion profiles

NEW YORK – More than a billion people now log into Facebook each month to check up on old friends, tag photos of new ones and post about politics, religion, cats or what their kids are doing.

That’s double the 500 million it hit in July 2010 – what now seems like a lifetime but was a little more than two years ago. August 2008 marked another big juncture, 100 million users.

The latest milestone also amounts to nearly half of the world’s roughly 2.5 billion Internet users, as measured by the International Telecommunications Union.

So who are these people?

Most of them – 81 percent – live outside the U.S. and Canada. Many of them log in on mobile devices rather than personal computers, and the company now has 600 million mobile users.

The people joining now are young, with a median age of 22. It was 23 in 2010 and 26 in 2008 and 2007. Most of them are from Brazil, India, Indonesia, Mexico and the United States. And millions of them are not actual people. Facebook acknowledged in August that 8.7 percent of its then-955 million users may be duplicate or false accounts. At that rate, as many as 87 million accounts are fake.

As expected, the longer users are on Facebook, the more “friends” they have on the site. A user who signed up two years ago has an average of 305 friends. Someone who signed up in December 2005, when Facebook had nearly 6 million users, now has nearly 600 friends, on average.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg marked the milestone on his Facebook page.

“If you’re reading this: thank you for giving me and my little team the honor of serving you,” he wrote. “Helping a billion people connect is amazing, humbling and by far the thing I am most proud of in my life.”