Facebook filing shows photo focus

Facebook filed for its initial public stock offering, and the forms reveal some interesting info on the social network’s use of pictures — starting with the opening picture in its filing, which emphasizes photography.

The company says it has “grown from our beginnings in a college dorm room in 2004 to a service that is fundamentally changing the way people connect, discover, and share around the world.” It had 845 million monthly active users as of December 31, 2011, an increase of 39 percent as compared to 608 million as of December 31, 2010.

Facebook reports it is “the most popular photo uploading service on the web. On average, more than 250 million photos per day were uploaded to Facebook in the three months ended December 31, 2011. Users can upload an unlimited number of high resolution photos, create photo albums, and share them with their friends or any audience they choose. Users can also upload and share videos. Users can set specific privacy settings for each of their photo albums and videos, making them visible to everyone, or only to certain friends. Users can easily arrange their photos, add captions, and “tag” people in a photo or video. Tagging allows users to identify a person in a photo or video as one of their friends.”

Facebook adds in its section on media storage and serving that it stores more than 100 petabytes (100 quadrillion bytes) of photos and videos, and has built its own storage and serving technologies “which allow us to efficiently serve and store the data.”

The complete filing is here.