850 Million. Trained.

“Facebook has trained 850 million people to sign up and create a profile.”

Ben Silbermann, co-founder of Pinterest.

Now take a step back and soak it in. Think about what that means for your product.

Think beyond just sign up and profile creation. 850 million people have been exposed to concepts, user interface elements and patterns as seen in Facebook. We no longer have to worry whether users “get it” when we throw in walls, lists, or friend pickers. Even esoteric behaviors like photo tagging and status updates have become mainstream.

In this kind of landscape, we should focus on discovering ways to evolve our users’ experience. Especially in ways that would better showcase the product we are building. Just like how Pinterest took the newsfeed and evolved it into the very effective, simple and much imitated grid.

Thanks to Facebook, there’s a whole generation of users trained in concepts we couldn’t previously take for granted. Let’s take advantage of that.