A European billion is what us Americans would call a trillion.

Yes, it IS very confusing. As always though, the European model actually makes more sense

I've never heard somebody use the word "billion" to mean a "million million" in the UK. Everybody always uses it in the "thousand million" sense. Sticking to the thousands makes a lot of sense, as it keeps numbers manageabe as they increase in size.

FB took about 9 months to get from 900million to1billion.......growth has def slowed down, and they need to watch out bc larger companies than MySpace and twitter, namely tech giants such as msft and google, have entered social media and size always gives a big advantage

About the billion thing.

As far as I know, it's not about location (NA or Europe) but about the language itself. In English a billion is always a thousand million. In Spanish, Portuguese, French, etc. it's a million million.

As for FB, congrats I guess. A billion people is huge, but they need to turn turn that potential into something more meaningful.

I hope you're lying.

one milliard

One milliard=1 billion?

A billion, and I am proud to say I am not one of them.

one European million = one American million
one milliard = one American billion
one European billion = one American trillion
one billiard = one American quadrillion

and so on...

I have never heard people say that the world population is "seven thousand million", always heard people say "seven billion".

In fact, outside of these sorts of discussions, I have never heard the term "a thousand million"