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“One billion people used Facebook in a single day”
- listingboat 11y agoIf this is logins, that's 1 million logins every 86.4 seconds on average
- alanh 11y agoIt’s not. :) Facebook logins last a long time. Shorter sessions would reduce usage / addiction
- furyofantares 11y agoAnd how many robots?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- mmanfrin 11y agoProbably far less than twitter, g+, or other social networks.
- fredgrott 11y agois Robert Scoble a robot?
- onewaystreet 11y agoLess than 2% according to Facebook's last 10-Q: "We also seek to identify "false" accounts, which we divide into two categories: (1) user-misclassified accounts, where users have created personal profiles for a business, organization, or non-human entity such as a pet (such entities are permitted on Facebook using a Page rather than a personal profile under our terms of service); and (2) undesirable accounts, which represent user profiles that we determine are intended to be used for purposes that violate our terms of service, such as spamming. In 2014, for example, we estimate user-misclassified and undesirable accounts may have represented less than 2% of our worldwide MAUs."
- furyofantares 11y agoInteresting. Do you know if they believe they are able to identify nearly all such accounts, and the only reason they persist is because it takes time to detect and they are able to gain whatever value they get out of the account before they are detected?
- Edmond 11y agonah not that many. Based solely on the number of long lost friends/acquaintances/family members (known & unknown) I have encountered on Facebook over the years, I am sure that stat is for real.
- smaili 11y agoRegardless of whether this includes real people or not, that's still quite a bit of load that they're able to handle. Have other services like Google or YouTube reached this milestone as well or is this an overall first for any site?
- phn 11y agoWithout absolutely nothing to base myself on, I'd guess Google has higher usage. Does anyone have any quick data at hand on this? EDIT: By usage I mean what's referenced on the article, number of unique people using the page.
- nkozyra 11y agoNot to be pedantic, but this isn't really about usage so much as unique humans. I think the fact that 1B separate human beings utilized the service is more astounding than, say, number of page views or requests.
- rev_bird 11y agoI'm having trouble figuring out which would be a bigger accomplishment -- 1 billion on Facebook's platform or Google's. I'd imagine the average Facebook user (viewing/uploading photos and video, multimedia ads, pages with a zillion pieces of dynamic content, etc.) has heavier responses, but Google needs to do more legwork to put together the comparatively light response to a regular old web search.
- nkozyra 11y agoIt's probably harder to quantify "people" with those services since they're not inherently tied to a single account. Given YouTube has long exceeded 5B pvs a day, I suspect they've come close if not surpassed it in a single day.
- magicalist 11y agoConsidering Android and Chrome have exceeded a billion users each (e.g. [1]), just default search page alone should guarantee that, let alone people who use google search in other browsers, youtube, google maps, gmail etc [1] http://venturebeat.com/2015/05/28/google-chrome-now-has-over-1-billion-users/ http://venturebeat.com/2015/05/28/google-chrome-now-has-over...
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y agoWhen the Facebook hack comes, it will be devastating.
- toomuchtodo 11y agoThe torrent to end all torrents.
- qrendel 11y agoWould it even be possible to exfiltrate all that data? It's hard to imagine even storing all that they're generating in a single day. What's the most an attacker could likely get? Usernames & passwords for all users? Complete profile/album/comment data on a few tens of millions?
- toomuchtodo 11y agoVery insightful question. The only way I could see this working is having a botnet network that extracts the data externally, encrypts and stores locally, and then each node serves up its cache over bittorrent to a command and control system. It's just so much data. The more valuable data, arguably, would be plain text profile data about people, not their photos. Assuming 7 billion people in the world (very conservative, for funsies), each profile containing 10 megabytes of profile data (exclude photos, just textual data), uncompressed, would be 70 petabytes. A lot of data to be sure, but not unsurmountable. Compressed, you could probably get down to 30-40 PB depending on compressibility.
- andrepd 11y agoWhy 7 billion people if FB has less than 1.5 billion users? And why 10MB? 10 megabytes of text is a lot of text.
- toomuchtodo 11y agoWas assuming worse case scenario. Based on 1.5 billion users and 3MB of text, its only ~4.5 PB. That's nothing.
- benwerd 11y agoWhich means at least as many people used the web. Good going, Internet!
- motti_s 11y agoNot necessarily, Facebook has mobile clients.
- tbomb 11y agoIt's still over the internet, right?
- benwerd 11y agoI admit to loosely using the "mobile clients are specialist browsers" line of thinking here. Facebook definitely uses links and HTTP.
- renownedmedia 11y agoFacebook mobile clients don't use the Internet?
- cryptoz 11y agoThe web is not the same as the Internet, though. The web is an open platform built on open protocols on top of the Internet.
- ljoshua 11y agoI'm curious to know what the metric is actually measuring. Is it one billion people that hit Facebook.com or used the mobile app? Or is it also counting people that might have triggered a hit just by browsing around sites with Like buttons on them while logged in, but didn't actually use Facebook? To some extent it doesn't matter because it's just such a massive and impressive number, but I'd be curious to know.
- austenallred 11y agoMy guess would be 1 billion unique accounts logged in today, via one means or another. Absolutely mind blowing.
- oh_sigh 11y agoWith approximately 100 million spam accounts, and 200 million shill accounts used for distasteful things like "like"ing Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bushes accounts.
- Phlarp 11y agoI wonder how many of those accounts are fake / sockpuppet / astroturf / paid likes
- austenallred 11y agoAgain, totally guessing here, but I would guess a negligible minority
- speeder 11y agoI had a GF that worked solely to create fake facebook accounts. She alone had about 15 of them, she worked in a company that had about 10 employees that did the same thing as she did. The company that she worked for, was one of the smallest ones, there are several others that are much, much bigger.
- 11y ago
- sombremesa 11y agoFrom one of the comments: 'Normal email communication and phone lines were down, but thank goodness FB was up!' Can someone explain this? How can FB be 'up' but E-mail be 'down'?
- Matt3o12_ 11y agoI'd guess that she used a local email provider (probably an email address provided by per ISP or another local email host), but their servers were down either because of the load (everybody was not trying to send emails), or their servers were down as well. Another possible option is that only her mobile internet worked and she didn't have email on her phone, thus she had to use facebook and now thinks my email doesn't work when it's needed.
- inerte 11y agoMaybe it was a local email provider. I haven't found this comment you're referring to but I guess it's disaster related, and it's plausible that an email provider/host went down
- Keyframe 11y agoMaybe through facebook zero?
- myth_buster 11y agoused Facebook in a single day Just to clarify, is that fb.com, messenger, whatsapp, comment widgets etc combined?
- why-el 11y agoI highly doubt they think that way when qualifying numbers for PR purposes. Regardless of how they connected to Facebook it is still Facebook Inc and it is still hell of a number.
- Phlarp 11y agoIf they are counting people who were only served a "like" button on other site's pages, this announcement boils down to "the internet is a big place! Full story at 11."
- myth_buster 11y agoExactly, if I visit a page where they have embedded commenting using fb id, it's not actually me visiting the site. An issue is if someone decides to place ADs in fb based on this publicity.
- JoeAltmaier 11y agoWait - half a billion of those were my sons, polling the site every 50 milliseconds
- tomvbussel 11y agoI wonder how they got that number. If getting Android notifications counts as 'using Facebook' then I'm one of those one billion.
- r3bl 11y agoWell, if I opened any article that has a like or a share/recommend button, I did technically send a request to Facebook and got something in return. Does that count as "using Facebook"?
- mamon 11y ago...and I wasn't among them :) gave up Facebook long time ago.
- cft 11y agoIf this was yesterday, I counted as 3, since I logged in into 3 of my 20 facebook accounts. Not sure how common that is.
- Kluny 11y agoWhy do you have 20 accounts?
- cft 11y agoFor fun: I like to create ficticious personages and sort of use it for micro-blogging. Also, I do not always want to use my real name when I reply to comments or link FB accounts to apps that require it.
- onedev 11y agoI can assure you that you are in the minority by a long long margin.
- lifeisstillgood 11y agoAs astounding as this number is - and the longer I think about it the more mind blowing it gets - Facebook is all-but the single-point-of-failure for an Internet that was designed not to do that. I look forward to the day we build these new protocols (sharing, social graphs, even search) in open distributed ways - the day Facebook becomes AOL in other words. I'm just not sure how. And if I was any non-US culture-aligned country, I would be wondering how to build that replacement - this is like television in the 1950s, but everyone around the world is watching NBC. But boy does 100bn dollars look cheap now.
- sd8f9iu 11y agoWhat's the big deal if Facebook goes down? If it's important, I email (Gmail going down would be more dire, I think). Or I can text people if I have their number. Or send a Hangout. Or Whatsapp. Or Skype. Or call them. Facebook has monopolized social media, not all communication.
- hk__2 11y agoTo add to your point, studies show that people use FB to keep contact with their existing friends; not to meet new ones. This means in most cases FB is not the only communication channel one has with their friends.
- dump100 11y agoWill have to also consider, FB login is most popular 3rd party login, add to that facebook comments and other widgets on 3rd party sites. FB going down will have a substantial impact
- sd8f9iu 11y agoThat's true, I forgot about that. Thankfully, most of the sites I use that have FB login are just for entertainment, not communication or anything serious. But that's true.
- shmerl 11y ago
- weavie 11y agoTo give you an idea of how big one billion actually is, (assuming you count once per second) it takes over 11 days to count up to 1 million. It takes over 31 years to count up to 1 billion.
- arcadeparade 11y agoWow that's almost 32 years.
- Dysprosium 11y agoSeems like our brain think in log.
- andreyf 11y agoThat's probably because the size of decimal digits written down on a piece of paper is in log.
- Gladdyu 11y agoOur number system is in log: value(number) ~ 10^length(number)
- egillie 11y agoThere's some evidence for that! http://www.sciencemag.org/content/320/5880/1217.abstract http://www.sciencemag.org/content/320/5880/1217.abstract
- monochromatic 11y agoProbably a lot longer than that. > assuming you count once per second One second is counting pretty slow for small numbers, but it's counting really fast for big numbers. (How quickly can you say "three hundred twenty five million seven hundred ninety six thousand one hundred seventeen"?) And there are a lot more big numbers than small numbers.
- adnrw 11y agoI agree that at some point (probably reasonably early on actually) it would start taking longer to say the number out loud than one second, so you'd fall behind. However we're talking about counting which is not necessarily saying it out loud. You could just be pushing a button every second, or watching a drop of water fall from a pipe at a constant rate. Anyway, I remember learning this little fact as a kid and it making the numbers (and the difference in magnitude between them) much more tangible. For context, at a rate of 1/sec/sec: 1 = 1 sec 10 = 10 sec 100 = ~1.5 min 1000 = ~17 min 10,000 = ~3 hours 100,000 = ~1 day 1,000,000 = ~12 days 10,000,000 = ~4 months 100,000,000 = ~3 years 1,000,000,000 = ~32 years
- jgalt212 11y ago3.2 B people on planet earth with Internet access. http://www.internetlivestats.com/internet-users/ http://www.internetlivestats.com/internet-users/ 31% of anyone on planet Earth who could conceivably use a facebook product did in one day. I call B.S. or way more than 3.2 B people on planet earth have Internet access.
- onedev 11y agoI think you underestimate the scale of Facebook to be honest. It's MASSIVE.
- jgalt212 11y agoI think you may be underestimating the amount of facebook attrition over the past 3-4 years.
- hk__2 11y agoDo you have any data on that?
- civilian 11y agoHe doesn't. Here's some data. June 2015 averaged 968mil daily active users. From their quarterly report: http://investor.fb.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=924562 http://investor.fb.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=924562 And quarterly reports aren't something you add marketing lies to.
- jgalt212 11y agook, well, let's attack this problem from another angle using the data you cite. 968 mil customers, $4.04 Billion in revenue. That makes $4.18 in revenue per customer for the quarter. You'd be hard pressed to name another going concern even 1/10th of facebook's size with such low rev/customer numbers. So what's wrong? They are either miscounting customers, or they are horrendously bad at achieving any non-trivial revenue on a per customer basis.
- alan_cx 11y agoAre users of sites which use facebook authentication included?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- acct123 11y agoJust to put this in perspective: Population of USA is about 300 million and Europe is about is 740 million. Together it is slight above 1 Billion, but Facebook had 1 Billion unique visitors in 1 day! That is just mind-boggiling.
- hanniabu 11y agoThat comes down to an average of 11,574 logins a second...
- peterjlee 11y agoCongrats to Facebook! Instead of poking holes to that number or saying something negative, I'm just going to say Congrats.
- guelo 11y agoTo me it's sad and scary for humanity that one profit seeking corporation has managed to wedge itself in the middle of all our relationships. In my ideal world Facebook would be run by a benevolent nonprofit, ala Wikipedia but more democratic.
- cheald 11y agoTo paraphrase Han Solo, "yeah, but who's gonna pay for it, kid? You?"
- umeshunni 11y agovia "A personal appeal from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg" banners, of course.
- KingMob 11y agoOnce upon a time, all Internet protocols were distributed, passed-along by ISPs peering bandwidth (email, IRC, Usenet). The users paid their ISPs, and the ISPs had agreements to share and not bill each other (sort of). This broke down, because most people monetizing an idea don't want others to host it outside their control. And now, even the peering agreement is breaking down, as Verizon tries to shakedown both sides of a network connection, and not just their subscribers. We had a friendly, open Internet, and now we have ads and closed-ecosystem apps. In Africa, Facebook Zero is trying to create the illusion that there's no other Internet, just Facebook. If things like Diaspora had the resources Facebook did, we could totally have distributed social networking, paid for by users.
- mburns 11y agoUsenet still exists, but herding cats never got any easier, and the cost for hosting didn't go away. There is a reason it became marginalized: user experience. Facebook Zero is no longer doing what you allege, and never actually did. It was just a plan that was scrapped. Diaspora never had a design or plan to work. It was a couple college kids who thought it would be neat despite never having written a distributed protocol before. We've had lots of smart people attempt this, and haven't gotten anywhere close to a usable "distributed" social network prototypes. If your idea can't bootstrap itself from zero users the way modern startups work, maybe it isn't such a great idea after all.
- hsnewman 11y agoI for one was not one of them. I closed my account years ago and haven't looked back. "Oh, look at the cute photo!"
- civilian 11y agoGiven that the Daily active users (DAU) averaged at 968mil for June 2015, this isn't too surprising. http://investor.fb.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=924562 http://investor.fb.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=924562 And this is a quarterly report. I don't think they can BS on this kind of thing.
- nabaraz 11y agoThere are 3.20 billion internet users which is 44% of 7.2 billion (1) 1 billion facebook users is 1/3 (32%). That is very impressive. 1) http://www.internetlivestats.com/internet-users/ http://www.internetlivestats.com/internet-users/
- brayton 11y agoWhat are the next closest products in terms of single day user count?
- josu 11y agoProbably YKK zippers.
- ljk 11y agolooks like some microsoft products have those numbers too - http://news.microsoft.com/bythenumbers/index.HTML http://news.microsoft.com/bythenumbers/index.HTML
- alecdbrooks 11y agoTaken together, Coca-Cola's beverages might come close: >Today, products of The Coca-Cola Company are consumed at the rate of more than 1.8 billion drinks per day. [0] However, it's hard to say how that translates to unique people, since it's not uncommon for people to drink more than one soda a day. Not to mention the fact that the product lineup is very diverse: you could have orange juice for breakfast (Minute Maid), water for lunch (Dasani), a sports drink after your workout (Powerade), and soda with dinner (Coke) and be individually responsible for four drinks. Probably unnecessary disclaimer: I own a small amount of Coca-Cola stock. [0] http://www.coca-colacompany.com/contact-us/faqs http://www.coca-colacompany.com/contact-us/faqs
- rconti 11y agoAnd the size of a drink. A packaged item? Or 8oz?
- ajkjk 11y agoI hate stuff like this: "A more open and connected world is a better world. It brings stronger relationships with those you love, a stronger economy with more opportunities, and a stronger society that reflects all of our values. Thank you for being part of our community and for everything you've done to help us reach this milestone. I’m looking forward to seeing what we accomplish together." It reeks of dishonesty. This kind of faux gratitude is ubiquitous in our corporation-heavy culture, and being continually exposed to it is part of what has led me to take most things unseriously - because it feels like no one who's serious is honest.
- ljk 11y agoctrl+f'd the quote here, couldn't have said better myself
- gull 11y ago"A more open and connected world is a better world." Well, it depends on the baseline. The goal should be to get the balance right. If you cross some threshold and become too open and too connected, the motto can easily flip to: a more secure (less open) and more independent (less connected) world. It would be to Facebook's advantage to think of the other half of the problem because it could be worth another billion users.
- logn 11y agoGiven that Zuckerberg and Co have access to the private lives of 1 in 7 people, enormous supplies of money, and a giant soapbox of influence, maybe we don't really want honesty--just politeness.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- __Joker 11y agoCan't agree more. FB is selective honesty at best and public gloating at worst. The people I know are awesomely different if I simply go through the FB profile. While It might not be specific to FB and generally applicable to any online community. Obviously FB would like to take credit for connectivity and all. On a side note, While I also get the same feeling dealing with American culture when compared to Asian cultures.
- lexcorvus 11y agoThis announcement makes me think of a quote from the Urbit dev mailing list [1]: Infinite or effectively infinite identity systems are not impossible to make spam-free. There is a very easy way to make them spam-free. Install a dictator. The dictator (call him "Zuck," because that's his name) is then subject to political pressures of various kinds, and pretty much has no choice but to decide, say, which kinds of videos you can and can't host. [1]: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/urbit-dev/zuck/urbit-dev/krwrSf0Mwoc/-VmPwxA1RTsJ https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/urbit-dev/zuck/ur...