Facebook is absolutely the name to beat in social media, and a central part of most of our lives today. If that wasn’t abundantly clear before, it should be now – Facebook has just announced that their service is now serving over one billion individual andactive users. Billion. With a b.

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a blog post today:

This morning, there are more than one billion people using Facebook actively each month.

If you’re reading this: thank you for giving me and my little team the honor of serving you.

Helping a billion people connect is amazing, humbling and by far the thing I am most proud of in my life.

Facebook also put out the following promotional video to help celebrate the milestone, which you can find by clicking the “Read More” button below.

Edit 3:30 PM EST 10/4/12: It’s worth pointing out  as AP Tech writer Barbara Ortutay did that many of these accounts – as many as 87 million – might be either duplicate accounts or otherwise false accounts. Facebook would likely have you believe that each account represents a single person, but that’s probably nowhere near the case.

Still, 1 billion is impressive. For comparison’s sake, Twitter has about 500 million active users, while newcomer premium microblogging service App.net just hit 20,000 users.

Source: Facebook Newsroom