The six year old giant social networking site reached the 500 million users mark last weekend and the site is expected to announce the actual number anytime this week.

We’ve posted a couple of months ago that Facebook has reached 400 million users and the sociam media network’s plans of spreading the company across the web as well as enriching the quality of the user’s social experience.

As part of the occasion, the site will be launching Facebook Stories, a special application that will feature short tales about users whose lives were changed because of Facebook.

500 million users are more than the latest population census of the United States which stands at 309 million. Only China and India have more people, each with a billion residents.

Analysts believe that advertisers will take advantage of the situation despite the fact that the site had encountered issues in the past few months. Such issues include privacy settings and the cartoon drawing competition that Muslim users found to be not good.

Facebook was created by Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg and was launched last February 4, 2004.