Facebook, the world’s largest social network, has officially signed up 500 million users worldwide.

Let’s put that into perspective: If Facebook were a country, it would be the 3rd most populous nation in the world, dwarfed only by India and China. The ride hasn’t been the smoothest however. Facebook has angered users since the 200 million mark, by radically altering the layout of the website on a whim. And unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last few months, you would’ve heard about the Facebook privacy fiasco that escalated in May, after Facebook decided to open up most of your sensitive information to the world.

In protest, users began pledging to delete their accounts on the 31st of May. Non-surprisingly, the so-called “movement” didn’t manage to gain any traction, resulting in 33,000 members deleting their account. After all, if information is sensitive, why post it to the internet? Nevertheless, Facebook started earning some very bad publicity – attracting the attention of American politicians. Eventually, Facebook revamped it’s over-complicated privacy controls into something much easier to understand and manage.

But little has been done to slow the growth of the networking giant, despite competition from MySpace, Bebo, Orkut and others. Twitter, however, which doesn’t classify as an entire social network, is still growing at a rapid pace. Facebook has previously “borrowed” features from Twitter, such as the News Feed, in order to remain relevant and competitive. It wouldn’t surprise me if the two websites start stamping on each others’ toes in the near future.

Despite having a Facebook account, I’m definitely not very comfortable with Mark Zuckerberg in control of my data, but when there’s no real alternative with the same kind of saturation as Facebook, it’s no surprise that people continue to sign up.