Technology

Facebook has 845 million monthly active users. Yes, that's impressive. Some skeptics who thought Facebook was celebrating milestones of cumulative registrations probably didn't realize the dot-com darling only counts current users. There are 483 million daily active users. In other words, more than half of Facebook's users are on the website in any given day. The key point here is that while active monthly users have climbed by 39% over the past year, daily active users have increased by 48%. In other words, Facebook continues to get stickier with consumers.  There are 100 billion friendship connections on the website.

Facebook generated in 2011 $3.7 Billion in revenue.  You didn't think a "free" website could generate that kind of money? Well, Facebook is the runaway leader in display advertising, and it's starting to make a decent amount of money through the payment platform that app developers are using. A neat thing about the revenue is that it's 88% ahead of 2010's top-line sum.  Facebook generated in 2011 $1 billion in net profit, and it has been profitable in each of the past three years. Divide $1 billion into $3.7 billion and you get net margins of 27%.   12% of Facebook's revenue comes from Zynga cutting it in on a piece of its gaming revenue action.  Facebook had $3.9 billion in cash at the end of 2011. Its working capital clocked in at $3.7 billion.