Facebook reaches positive cash flow and 300m users

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's chief executive, reported the social networking site's user growth in a blog post in which he thanked users for their support in reaching the milestone.

He said: "As of today, Facebook now serves 300m people across the world. It's a large number, but the way we think about this is that we're just getting started on our goal of connecting everyone.

"We face a lot of fun and important challenges that require rethinking the current systems for enabling information flow across the web.

"Over time, Facebook will continue to be as strong as all of the connections you make. We'll continue building new and better things to make connecting with the people you care about as easy and rewarding as possible."

Facebook had projected that it would become cash-flow positive sometime in 2010 but the firm has reported that it reached that target during the last quarter, generating cash from operations, independent of recent investments.

The company said that it would continue to invest in the long-term development of the social networking site to "create more value for its core constituents -- users, developers and advertisers".

Zuckerberg said: "We're succeeding at building Facebook in a sustainable way. This is important to us because it sets Facebook up to be a strong independent service for the long term."

Facebook, which hit the 250m user mark back in July, is the fourth most visited website in the world, behind Google, Microsoft and Yahoo!, according to figures released by ComScore last month.

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