Presenter: According to Marcia Clemmitt's 2010 CQ Researcher article on social networking, Facebook had over 1 million users in 2005, just one year after its initial launch. This growth from zero to a million in one year was quite an impressive feat. Today, according to a May 2013 article on the number of active Facebook users published by the Associated Press, Facebook harbors over 1.16 billion members. That's almost four times the population of the United States.

Like Facebook, Twitter's growth has also been astronomical. Shea Bennett, editor of the Media Bistro sponsored blog All Twitter, reports in an October 2013 article that Twitter had 218 million active users at the end of June 2013. Like Facebook, Twitter's success can be largely attributed to the demand for virtual communities that enable us to connect with one another.