Just as you take stock of your life when you reach a birthday milestone, Facebook re-evaluated its looks on its sixth birthday, coming to the conclusion that a make-over was in order. 

If you have visited the site in the last few days you'll have noticed that your notification, requests and messages have jumped to the top left of the page. There's also a new Applications and Games dashboard that displays the apps you and your friends have recently made the most use of. 

The homepage isn't the only new addition to the site though, there's also a new photo uploader in the wings. When it becomes available during the next few weeks, you will have to install this new photo plug-in and restart your browser, but the new features on offer are worth it. One of the new features is "...asynchronous uploading, that allows you to navigate away from the upload page, or even away from Facebook completely, while your photos continue to upload in the background," explained Chris Putnam, an engineer at Facebook, on a posting on Friday. 

In another post on Friday, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said, “Facebook began six years ago today as a product that my roommates and I built to help people around us connect easily, share information and understand one another better. We hoped Facebook would improve people’s lives in important ways. So it’s rewarding to see that as Facebook has grown, people around the world are using the service to share information about events big and small and to stay connected to everyone they care about.” 

Facebook currently has a user base of over 400 million, which if it were a country would make it the third most populous nation on the planet after China and India. In related news, the BBC reported that over 5 million mobile users in the UK spent over 2.2 billion minutes on Facebook during December alone, viewing over 2.6 million pages on the social networking site. The total number of users is probably higher, seeing that the user data only came from three of the UK’s five mobile networks. South Africa has the 29th largest Facebook population, which is impressive since it only recently surpassed the 5 million mark in terms of people who have access to the web.