Facebook says it made money for first time

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PALO ALTO, Calif., Sept. 16 (UPI) -- U.S. social networking site Facebook ended the last quarter in the black, beating its goal of profitability by 2010, its chief executive officer says.

In a posting Tuesday on the Facebook Web site, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the site now has 300 million users, up from 250 million in July, CNN reported. That would mean the site has grown by about 800,000 new users a day, creating a community around the world that is almost as large as the 307 million people who live in the United States.

The privately owned company did not announce the size of its quarterly earnings. Zuckerberg said the earnings are significant because the profit shows Facebook can sustain itself.

"We're just getting started on our goal of connecting everyone," Zuckerberg wrote on the company's blog. "Because we want to make it as easy and fast as possible for the world to connect, one of the things we think a lot about is how to make Facebook perform even faster and more efficiently as we grow," he wrote. "We face a lot of fun and important challenges that require rethinking the current systems for enabling information flow across the Web."