Facebook Growing Seven Times Faster Than LinkedIn

Assuming Facebook's growth hasn't fallen off a cliff, it's now signed up 160 million users. As of early January, it was signing up about 430,000 new users a day, or 10 million users every 23 days. So after hitting 150 million users on Jan. 7, it probably reached 160 million sometime over the weekend. (Or will early this week.)

How's business-focused rival LinkedIn doing?

In Davos, LinkedIn founder and CEO Reid Hoffman tells TechCrunch that the company is growing by about 1 million new users every 17 days. That's an average 59,000 new users a day, or about one seventh of Facebook's user growth rate. (LinkedIn has more than 34 million users.)

But: While Facebook is famously unprofitable, Hoffman says LinkedIn has $80 million in the bank and has "been profitable for the last two years."

"When we want to IPO we can do that," Hoffman said.