Facebook is now used by 30 million people in the UK, approximately half the population, it said today.

Joanna Shields, vice president of Facebook Europe, made the announcement this morning at a media conference in London.

She said: "We can announce today that we have reached 30 million in the UK, which we are really excited about."

Globally, Facebook has more than 500 million registered users, a milestone it hit last summer. Last July, it also revealed that 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, launched in February 2004. The pace of its global growth has accelerated rapidly - Facebook had only 150 million registered users in January 2009.

Last year, Zuckerberg, Facebook's founder and chief executive, said it was "almost a guarantee" that the site would hit one billion users, while speaking at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival. He explained: "If we succeed [in innovating and remaining relevant] there is a good chance of bringing this [Facebook] to a billion people...it will be interesting to see how it plays out."

One third of women aged 18 to 34 check Facebook when they first wake up, before even going to the toilet, according to research. Twenty-one per cent of women aged between 18 to 34 check Facebook in the middle of the night, while 42 per cent 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 on a regular basis. "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 disabled the feature which allowed Google users to sync their contacts with Facebook friends.

(Read by Lee Hannon. Lee Hannon is a journalist at the China Daily Website.)

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(Agencies)