Today marks the 12-year anniversary since Facebook first began turning the word “friend” into a verb, and as usual, the company is celebrating its birthday with its annual Friends Day event, which focuses on the connections people have made through the social network. “The acts of friendship, love and kindness we all share on Facebook are changing the world every day in ways we can’t fully measure, he further wrote”. A study in 2011 by researchers from Cornell University, the Università degli Studi di Milano and Facebook found that, across the 721m people who were using the site at the time, the average number of links needed to connect any two people was 3.74.
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Users can watch a preview of what the website automatically put together, and if they see something they don’t like, they can edit and choose which photos to use and arrange their positions before sharing it to their friends. Some of that leads to really cool data points, like the degree of separation, and some of it leads to the interactive Friends Day videos you won’t be able to escape this week. Facebook’s gross revenue in the year 2015 stood at $17.93 billion, an increase of 44 percent year-over-year. The company is also releasing a best friends and friendship sticker pack and these can be downloaded for free in the sticker store.
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So you can now celebrate alongside Facebook with two new tools that allow you to see how the social network has helped you become friends with so many people. Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg scores a 3.19, and its COO Sheryl Sandberg is even more connected with an average of 2.92. The occasion, which the company is calling “Friends Day”, is meant to celebrate real-life friendships through photos and life events.
