Mark Zuckerberg confirmed that Facebook had surpassed 750 million monthly active users today at a product launch in Palo Alto.

He said the company had declined to announce it earlier because it’s become focused on other metrics, including how actively users are sharing information.

“Hopefully, we’ll get to a billion at some point,” he said. “I think people generally think that’s going to happen at some point.”

The announcement suggest that Facebook’s growth, at least in terms of raw monthly actives, is continuing at a linear, not exponential, pace. The company has been growing at just under 50 million monthly actives every two months since late 2009. It last said it was at 500 million monthly actives a year ago.

Zuckerberg said he believes social networking is moving into a different era — one that is more predicated on the strength of connections rather than the quantity of users or ubiquity of the technology.

“Social networking is at an inflection point,” he said. “Mostly it was about connecting people and there was still this question about whether social networking was going to be this widespread, ubiquitous service in the world. That chapter is more or less done at this point.”