Facebook just hit yet another milestone, passing 50mm active users. These 50mm users generate 34 Billion Page Views a month, making it the 4th largest website in the world.

As incredible as it seems, in my conversations with many people outside of the “industry”, I find most people over 30 still are generally clueless as to what Facebook is and why they should care. I’d say I manage to persuade about 95% of these Facebook Virgin’s to take the plunge and have their first Friending experience. Its not hard to imagine that the other 100,000 or so Facebook developers are having similar conversations around the world.

One of the big bets I’ve made in my company (when Facebook had about 25mm users), is that this growth rate was going to continue despite the law of large numbers and it is sure exciting to see it unfold in such a spectacular fashion.

Speaking of which, our first Facebook Game, “MyGladiator” is coming along nicely. If you’d like to join our private beta, please friend me and I’ll let you in.

Tags: facebook

What a crazy week, in case you missed us on ABC news, we announced MyGladiator at the DEMO show on Tuesday morning. I just discovered that Network World has chosen us at one of the Top 5 Coolest companies, which is a pretty nice way to get things rolling.

You can watch their video here (we are towards the end of the video):
http://www.networkworld.com/video/092507ct-demofall07day1.html?tab=recent

We’ve gotten quite a bit of media coverage and have been contacted by thousands of people who are itching to battle their facebook friends. We are doing our best to get this game into your hands as soon as we can…we just have a few more cool features to wire up and then we will open it up to a live beta.

This was my first time at DEMO and I highly recommend it, it was a lot of fun, we got great investor and customer interest and we made a lot of new friends.

Tags: MyGladiator

Facebook announced today that they have 41 million active users up 70% since they opened their platform up to folks like me just a few months ago.  My last number from MySpace has them still holding a dwindling lead of 52 million active users.  Just seems like the change in leadership position is inevitable at this point.

CEO Mark’s chess move to open his platform and embrace the development community might well have been the checkmate in this current game of social network battles.  Bravo.

Tags: facebook

Here we go…Ncursion, Inc. has been officially formed and we are hard at work trying to create what we hope will be a spectacular product. We will be announcing it at the upcoming DEMO conference, so I’m not allowed to say anything about it yet, except that I hope we get it finished on time.

My plan right now is to use this blog as a place to post occasional interesting things that are happening here at our company, to beg really awesome people to come work for us and to share some of the more interesting perspectives on things relevant to our business that I come across.

In that regard, Ncursion is a 100% Facebook Platform company. We are focused on developing really great “entertainment apps” (apps is the word used to describe applications that are built for Facebook.).

Instead of me telling you about why we made this decision, I’ll just link you to the blog post that I read that caused me to move in this direction. Its by Marc Andreessen and its called “Analyzing the Facebook Platform 3 Weeks In.”

Basically, what Marc does far better then I ever could, is to lay out really clearly, just what an amazing, incredible, earth shaking opportunity the development of the Facebook API could turn out to be. I read it a few times, chewed on it for a few weeks and then finally realized this is one of those big knocks on the door that I just had to answer.

So Marc, if you ever read this, one day down the road I hope to be sending you a bottle of Crystal for making that post. And don’t worry, if things go wrong, I’ll take full responsibility.

Tags: Startup Thoughts