Facebook roars past the 300 million mark

300 million.

That's the number of users the social networking giant Facebook had collected by Tuesday – a staggering figure that indicates how globally popular the site has become. In a blog post today, CEO Mark Zuckerberg called the landmark positive, but said he was looking forward to expanding Facebook's reach even further.

"We're just getting started on our goal of connecting everyone," Zuckerberg wrote:

Because we want to make it as easy and fast as possible for the world to connect, one of the things we think a lot about is how to make Facebook perform even faster and more efficiently as we grow. We face a lot of fun and important challenges that require rethinking the current systems for enabling information flow across the web.

Last week, Facebook rolled out a slimmed-down, streamlined, super-svelte offering dubbed Facebook Lite. The functionality is aimed at late-adopters and other folks still learning how to navigate the wild world of social networking. But it seems also designed to take on Twitter, the popular microblogging site.

In a report published this spring, Nielsen revealed that Facebook users were spending approximately 13.9 billion minutes on the site per month. Users of MySpace, by comparison, were spending only 5 billion minutes per month.

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Volkswagen’s E-Up! An electric car for the people?

It’s a far cry from a $100,000 Tesla, but a new electric car concept from Volkswagen has people charged up. The diminutive E-Up! is just 125.6-inches long – a Mini Cooper is 20 inches longer – and isn’t going to haul four kids to soccer practice. And its 11.3 second 0-60 time won’t win any drag races. But that’s not the point. If all goes as planned, by 2013, E-Up! will be a mass-produced all-electric car from a major automaker, accessible to the average person.

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