Facebook has now made half a billion friends, meaning one in every 14 people on Earth has joined the social networking website, the company confirmed this week.

Six years after Mark Zuckerberg's company got its start in a Harvard dorm room, Facebook has taken aim at reaching one billion members, matching the number of Google users.

Facebook spokesperson Randi Zuckerberg said much of the next 500 million users could come from India and Brazil, two large countries where the service is underperforming.

"We just announced 12 million users in India and six million in Brazil, those are really exicitng numbers for us because just this time last year we had just a very small footprint in those countries," she told Canada AM Thursday morning in a telephone interview.

Zuckerberg also said mobile use is going to drive growth.

"One-hundred-and-fifty million people access Facebook actively on their mobile phones, which I think it is going to be paramount to our growth in the years to come," she said.

Last summer, Facebook had 250 million members and the website has gained 100 million new members since February of this year.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said in a blog post he could "never (have) imagined all of the ways people would use Facebook."

In a video message, Zuckerberg announced the launch of "Facebook Stories" to highlight stories about Facebook's impact on its users.

The service will let users search stories based on location or on themes, such as love, grief, crime solving, politics or health.

Also to mark the 500 million milestone, the company had all of its employees record some kind of "Thank You" for users of the service at www.facebook.com/thanks.

A few Facebook facts:

• If Facebook was a country it would be the third largest, behind only China and India

• Facebook has 15 times more users than Canada's entire population

• Facebook has 100 billion hits a day

• There are more than 50 billion photos on Facebook