Facebook just announced passing the 300 million active user mark. In early April ReadWriteWeb asked about the size of Facebook with the answer being – “bigger than the population of all but 4 countries in the world.” As of today it’s bigger than the population of all but 3 countries in the world and it’s gaining on the US. Like any great nation, Facebook is asking it’s citizens to pitch in. The company just launched Prototypes – a demo site for members to test early stage beta products. Similar to other lab environments, the company will offer users a chance to test new tools and give their feedback.
Facebook launched a number of new product features this year including the latest Facebook iPhone app, status tagging and Facebook Lite. With the new Prototypes service, the community will have a chance to see early releases that come out of the community’s late night hackathons and Facebook developer garage.
As ReadWriteWeb has said in the past, “Whereas MySpace is still a website, Facebook has become an entire eco-system.” With the new Prototypes site, Facebook is not only leveraging its users to create new applications, but also crowdsourcing their reviews to improve the development environment.
To access Prototypes, users can visit the Application Directory and filter by “Prototypes” to find new projects. Some of the current Prototypes for users to review include the Mac Desktops Notifications application, search by “Similar Posts”, Photo Tag Search and Recent Comments Filter. The project will begin rolling out gradually beginning this afternoon.
