Kara Swisher

Recent Posts by Kara Swisher

Hey, Over Here, Everyone Plotzing Over Twitter Funding! "Aarrr," It's Facebook

pirateberg.jpg

Nobody, but nobody, releases news late Friday afternoon before a holiday weekend, unless they are trying to do a PR pirate raid on another company.

So it was nice to see Facebook, which tried and failed to buy Twitter, having the moxie to release impressive user numbers for the fast-growing social-networking site just as all the oxygen was getting sucked out of the media room by news that the microblogging start-up got $35 million in new funding and a $250 million valuation.

In a Facebook press release today that arrived at 2:31 p.m. PST: More than 175 million users, with an average of 120 friends on the site; three billion minutes spent daily on Facebook; 850 million photos uploaded monthly; and more.

And, oh, yes: “More than 15 million users update their statuses at least once each day.”

Translation from Facebook founder and CEO Mark “Talk-Like-a-Pirate” Zuckerberg: Aarrr! Yer a scurvy bilge rat, puny Twitter!

Here’s an image of the new Facebook stats page (click on it to make it larger):

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Another gadget you don’t really need. Will not work once you get it home. New model out in 4 weeks. Battery life is too short to be of any use.

— From the fact sheet for a fake product entitled Useless Plasticbox 1.2 (an actual empty plastic box) placed in L.A.-area Best Buy stores by an artist called Plastic Jesus