Facebook is now used by 30 million people in the UK, around half the population. Joanna Shields, vice president of Facebook Europe, made the announcement this morning at a media conference in London. Globally, Facebook has more than 500 million registered   users, a milestone it hit last summer. Last July it had 26 million registered UK users. In the last eight months, it has attracted four million extra UK users, bringing the UK total to 30 million. Facebook, the brainchild of Mark Zuckerberg while he was still studying at Harvard University, was launched in February 2004. The pace of its global growth has sped rapidly - Facebook had only 150 million registered users in January 2009. One third of women aged between 18 to 34 check Facebook when they first wake up, before even going to the toilet, according to the research. 21% check Facebook in the middle of the night, while 42% of the same group think it is fine to post drunken photos of themselves onto the social network, a study by Oxygen Media and Lightspeed Research found. Shields was speaking this morning at the Financial Times Digital Media and Broadcasting Conference about the power Facebook's referrals  can bring to media sites, such as newspapers and TV services. She explained that the average Facebook user has 130 friends who they share links to media sites with regularly. "Media companies which take advantage of that are really seeing the benefits," Shields said. Shields refused to be drawn on whether Facebook would develop its own mobile phone operating system and also said it was "silly" that Google had recently _ the feature which allowed Google users to refresh their contacts with Facebook friends. Eight months ago the number of registered users of Facebook in UK was about   _  .
less than half of its population 30 million 4 million 500 million