San Francisco - Facebook, the world's largest social network on the internet, is finally turning a profit, the privately held company said. The Silicon Valley, California, company, which was started six years ago by a student at Harvard University, said late Tuesday that it had reached a positive cash flow for the first time and also passed the 300-million user mark.
The stratospheric growth in the site's user base from 150 million at the start of the year, allowed the company to turn a profit earlier than the 2010 date it had previously predicted.
"This is important to us because it sets Facebook up to be a strong independent service for the long term," said Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in a blog posting.
"We are succeeding at building Facebook in a sustainable way," he wrote. "We are just getting started on our goal of connecting everyone. We face a lot of fun and important challenges that require rethinking the current systems for enabling information flow across the web."
The company has close to 1,000 employees and has received 600 million dollars in financing. According to recent web figures,it is the fourth most-visited website in the United States.
