As It Celebrates Its Sixth Birthday, Facebook Surges To 400 Million Users

It’s been six years to the day that Facebook launched, and the company’s massive growth is showing no signs of slowing down. Minutes ago, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted a note to the site’s blog celebrating the milestone. In it, he says that Facebook will cross the 400 million user mark this week. And it’s been less than five months since the social network hit 300 million.

To celebrate, the company is holding its own version of a party — it’s Hackathon time. That means all of the company’s engineers are about to embark on all night coding sessions. Previous Hackathons have given birth to things like Facebook Video and its new HipHop PHP converter. Zuckerberg also says that we’ll be seeing some new product launches tonight (we’ll be covering them as soon as each goes live).

In light of the event, here’s a collection of screenshots of Facebook profiles and homepages from the last few years (Facebook actually put most of this gallery together in honor of its fifth birthday, but it’s always fun to look back at how far the site has come). Also note that the last screenshot in the timeline has its days numberd — Facebook is currently rolling out another redesign.

A lot has changed, much of it for the better. But I still miss the glory days when a poke took up a quarter of my screen.