“One billion people used Facebook in a single day”
facebook.com
facebook.com
"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.
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.
Do you think Zuck doesn't actually believe these things? I'm not sure I understand the charge of dishonesty here.
Indeed, I'm not sure I even see anything in that quote that isn't true, let alone something that I don't think Zuckerberg believes to be true.
What's more, I think he's actually grateful to the users of facebook. Who wouldn't be? Again: corporate-ese? Sure. Dishonest though? Not really seeing it.
I don't trust anything he says, as the frontman of a giant money-making enterprise, that purports to be about "connecting people" or a "stronger society".
I'm not saying he should be "more honest" by mentioning "and congrats to our investors for making so much $$". I'm saying he should leave the sentimental stuff to someone else, because he's got a conflict of interest that makes everything he says seem like bullshit.
Facebook is investing a huge amount of money and resources[1] to connect the world. You may think that they do it only for money which is fair, but as Zuckerberg said on Bloomberg[2] there is not a lot of money to be made, if not at all, by fighting to give internet access from mid to poor countries. " If we were primarily focused on profits, the reasonable thing for us to do would really just be to focus on the first billion people using our products. The world isn't set up equally, and the first billion people using Facebook have way more money than the rest of the world combined. So from a biz perspective, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense for us to put the emphasis into this that we are right now. "
Even if he does it only for money, what he is doing will only be profitable after more than 10 years. And the profits won't be exciting because of the poverty, the small growth of these counties, and their capacity to have a better GDP per Capita. With $15 per day what can you do with that? And with this total amount to be spent how can you have any CPC being not close to 0? It will be better for these people in 10 years maybe or more but, not now unfortunately...
So his mission does seem to have a more open world and to connect people first. You have more in the interview.
[1]https://internet.org/projects
[2]http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-02-19/mark-zucke...
Why do you phrase your criticism as though you're speaking down to a child?
To some extent it doesn't matter because it's just such a massive and impressive number, but I'd be curious to know.
Absolutely mind blowing.
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.
Yes but did she connect to all of them on monday by a mean or another?
I think that's the fact it was on a single day that makes this number impressive.
To do this they created a program that searched the internet for pictures of someone in various situations, then prepared a easy-to-use library of photos to be uploaded every "x" period to look like a real person.
The account operator (or operators for some particularly prized accounts) would then log-in, post the photo scheduled, and write a post on the fly, the best operators could make the fake account look like a real person, fooling not only other users but bots, tracking software and whatnot.
The accounts that looked particularly real were very useful for PR efforts, some of the biggest clients were appliances manufacturers (example of one of them: GE), and one of the uses was for example one day try to distract the public after some bad news about washing machines causing accidents went viral, or try to create a counter-post that is viral too (in the washing machine case it worked, the viral post stopped being viral in 3 or 4 hours, and not even me remember what was the issue with the washing machines).
Obvious guesses (with prior evidence!) is: Government astroturfing & information gathering (hot girl friends you + gov't gains access to your "private" content), and brand astroturfing.
Edit: And most of my friends have two or three real FB accounts, one for close friends, one for older relatives/their parents' friends, and one for work acquaintances/bosses. I am in the minority in only maintaining one real account.
Beside creating false rumours for PR objectives, another use of the accounts was try to reach 5000 people in them (I dunno now, but when she was my GF facebook converted people accounts with 5000 friends into pages with 5000 followers, then ad companies could sell those to kickstart company pages).
For a billion users, they need 1/6 of the worlds population. No way do they have that.
How many kids under 7? under 5? in the world. Don't have accounts. How many elderly over 80? 70? don't have accounts.
What is the % of non-"developed" countries? Not 1/6
Compared to people running multiple accounts (personal / professional/ seo accounts / spam accounts), now that I have heard of.
Regardless, they still have a hell of a lot of users, but 1b real, I doubt
Unless shown otherwise, I will assume this number includes anyone whom Facebook sent an email to or whom ended up on a page that loaded a script from a Facebook property.
If your machine requests data from Facebook's machine, it's a use of Facebook. There's no way around that.
If Facebook sends personalized content in that request, then there really is no argument that this does not constitute a technical use of Facebook.
However, in most cases, users are not voluntarily making those requests to Facebook, but are more or less forced into making them by some third party (eg. any site using Facebook for a comments section).
Seems to me it is mainly just due to the fact that most here haven't worked at anything anywhere close to FB scale and can't believe it can actually be true.
A public officer of the company isn't going to be haphazard about redefining that without saying so.
Edit: You'll note that Mark didn't even use that word.
Without going into details / trade secrets: there is more than one system, they can cross-check each other, and if anything it's conservative. You have to perform legit, non-drive-by actions on either the site or the app before you're counted as an active user on a given day.
If that's not enough for you, well, maybe I can't help that. But I am curious what evidence leads you to believe something different. Serious question, genuinely curious.
Edit: to be clear, and IIRC, seeing a Like button is not counted. Actually Liking something, which posts to your news feed, does.
Neither of you have said just having FB button appear on a 3rd party site counts - that would get what 3bn users :-)
I'm curious if multiple accounts are common, or just a few percent of users take it to that level.
Also it's worth looking into the timing of this announcement. Logically, if Mark is as smart as I think he is, he would use these kind of announcements to boost share value and/or give publicity.
I'm consistently amazed at how well the likes of FB, Google/Youtube, AWS and Netflix actually work by those organizations. Yes there is the occasional down time where things are partially down... just the same that they manage to handle the sheer volume of traffic is truly impressive. Most businesses don't really need more than what a large co-located server offers in compute and storage...
To create a system that services requests from hundreds of millions of simultaneous users throughout the world is genuinely impressive.
Of course it does have its' cracks... The mobile browser interface is more and more gimped as time passes, and the comments for posts that don't have hundreds of replies is equally borked (don't see all replies, or your own half the time). "Eventually Consistent" has it's price... but the reward is handling hundreds of millions of users at one time.
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.
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.
If there is no Internet access then there is no Internet. Critics of Facebook's initiatives should need to provide compelling alternatives if they want to be taken seriously.
If there were a well designed open source router with a decent app store with equivalents of all the web apps you use online, I'm sure you could get a lot of people to start sharing their baby pictures using software installed on that.
I'd switch to something like that in a heartbeat if it existed.
Once somebody makes an easy to use, beautiful router with a vibrant one-click-install app ecosystem (backup, calendar, photos, dropbox, email), I'm sure people will want to migrate to it. It's not just about privacy it's also about being more in control of your data, being 'closer' to your data (uploading your baby photos wouldn't take as long) and not having your experience dictated by profit seeking (your app won't mysteriously switch itself to top stories every other day).
We're just not there yet. Every kind of 'smart router' and associated OSS software is kind of a pile of crap, to be honest.
I think you're asserting a demand without any indications of its existence.
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.
Remember that thing when a guy from Europe asked from Facebook to give him everything they knew about him (which European citizens are allowed to request by law) and got over 1000 pages of information from Facebook?
Now, multiply that by a billion (well, two or three billions actually).
Can they? TIL. It would be a fun thing to know, exactly how much they know about you.
- When an organization collects data about you, they are forced to tell you about it (unless they're police or something I guess) and tell you what they are going to do with it. In Dutch this is called the "Informatieplicht persoonsgegevens".
- Upon reasonable request, an organization must give you all information they can reasonably give you. "Reasonably" means, given a normal amount of effort. If they need to contact the garbage collectors and dig up an old cassette they threw away years ago, that is unreasonable to ask. They may also charge a fee, but the limit is quite low I think.
- You can ask an organization to correct or remove your personally identifiable information if you have a good reason or if they have no reason not to. For example if you ask to remove your IP address from logs and they want to keep it for security purposes for 4 weeks, their argument sounds pretty reasonable (unless you have some better reason).
- They cannot keep personally identifiable information for longer than necessary. For example, log files from the web server may be kept for security purposes, but if you have ten year old log files, that is too long to be reasonable for that purpose and is thus illegal.
One thing I've always wondered about is how applicable this is to foreign organizations with websites accessible from the Netherlands. I've heard some people say that for companies with customers in the Netherlands, Dutch law applies and those customers have the above rights. Nobody seems to comply with that, though. Another thing I've heard is that if they have an office here, that office can be held to our laws. I should look that up some time.
Then, there was a shit ton of persons from Europe (like, dozens of thousands) who tried to do the same through a combined court order in Vienna. Then, the court in Vienna decided that this issue was "not admissible on procedural grounds". Then, those thousands of people got generic responses like: "You can download every data we store on you by going into your settings...". Then there was an appeal to that decision and then the whole thing died out.
I found the website that organized this: http://europe-v-facebook.org/EN/en.html
According to http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2013/01/18/faceb... , people upload 350 million new photos per day, and they have 240 billion photos total. If we use 1 MB per photo as an average, you'd need about 334 terabytes to store a day of Facebook's pictures. You'd need 228882 terabytes to store the whole thing. Assuming Wikipedia's estimate of $35/TB for desktop hard drives, it would cost about $8 million to store Facebook's photo archive (that's without videos or text). Actually hosting it would cost even more.
(228882 TB to Gb) sec to years = 58 yr 3 w 1 day 18 h 40 min
58 years is going to take a long time
That's why this is more a storage problem than a bandwidth problem in practice. That's a lot of hard drives. While it might be possible to build up a botnet of a few hundred thousand slave machines to download and store it all, the task is by no means trivial.
The real hack will be using Facebook to infect people with malware. Which will probably be staggeringly easy once they get inside.
It will be impossible to remove, it will hijack legitimate connections to non-FB accounts with injection attacks, it will expose all the credentials of all the users of all the services of these 1 billion people. The compromise of sites that rely on Facebook for authentication tokens will pale in comparison.
Attack vectors: app upgrades, browser exploits, e-mail/messenger/comment phishing, 3rd party comment section or ad-network injection, desktop integration, and of course, all the mobile networks that provide Facebook data access for free (which are largely non-smartphone and have rudimentary interfaces).
One billion people will be prompted in some way, or immediately exploited using 0-days, and I would wager around 20% of users would be infected within a few hours of actually starting the attack. That's 200 million infected devices (edit: users; number of devices may be many times more). Depending on the point of entry and the access gained (let's say 20 percent of the infections lead to compromise of the whole system), that's 40 million accounts compromised in a few hours.
Banks, email accounts (which lead to everything else), online shopping, e-wallets, etc all stolen. Then the data extortion packages will encrypt all the phones and wipe any usable data and demand payment or destruction of data. There'll be a very short timer, too, because the bank and other financial account session data may be reset quickly. There is a potential that markets could crash worldwide as financial balances get shifted around at the speed of the internet.
Screw the Facebook data. This is a compromise that organized crime and state actors would invest millions of dollars to set up. And it's a virtual certainty that it will happen one day.
Hell, it's probably already happening. Facebook's a big company. Not inconceivable to think that there might be at least one underpaid, disgruntled, obese, bespectacled mole in their ranks, quietly subverting security measures and siphoning data until he gets his $1.5 million pay day and heads off to retire in Costa Rica (or attempt to before getting eaten by Dilophosaurus while trying to escape Facebook's HQ...).
But I post photos of my children with the assumption that I have privacy from the masses, and I think Facebook offers that.
My ex girlfriend can't access those photos. Yes, I agree they're not private, I know someone can copy them and email them to her. The government has access. They're sitting in public CDNs, the URL to them has no security etc etc.
But those photos still have a level of privacy.
So yes, I think there are many people who put things on Facebook expecting they're private. Not private in the way you mean, but private in the way I mean.
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.
1 billion facebook users is 1/3 (32%). That is very impressive.
used Facebook in a single day
That is just mind-boggiling.
It takes over 31 years to count up to 1 billion.
> 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.
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 yearsMy grandfather, when I was a teenager, wanted to impress upon me the vastness of large money numbers. He was wanting me to better understand how large these sums were when discussing personal wealth in the millions+, as well as how even larger such sums were when discussing government expenditures.
He made me do this same math, suggesting spending $1/second. When I calculated, and wound up with these same numbers for spending $1M & $1B--which I always rounded up to 12 days & 32 years respectively--he succeeded in cementing his point in my mind.
I have never forgotten it in over 20 years.
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.
Have other services like Google or YouTube reached this milestone as well or is this an overall first for any site?
EDIT: By usage I mean what's referenced on the article, number of unique people using the page.
[1] http://venturebeat.com/2015/05/28/google-chrome-now-has-over...
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/ur...
>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.
"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."
Can someone explain this? How can FB be 'up' but E-mail be 'down'?
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.
Here's some data. June 2015 averaged 968mil daily active users. From their quarterly report: http://investor.fb.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=924562 And quarterly reports aren't something you add marketing lies to.
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.
When undeveloped countries start developing faster, revenue per user per year will rise sharply in those regions as well, thus increasing Facebook's overall revenue significantly. That's why both Google and Facebook are focusing heavily on getting internet to 3rd world countries.
This is a long term game and they are winning.
But will they? If you look at G-7 vs non G-7 markets over any reasonable time frame, what evidence makes you expect that non G-7 revenues will come anywhere close to G-7 revenues on a per customer basis? And given how stringent the EU is on privacy concerns, perhaps EU revenues will forever remain significantly lower than US revenues on a per-customer basis.
--- going off topic:
From your responses, you're definitely intelligent. But you're not using that intelligence to seek truth, you're just doing your best to tear down facebook. I'm sure it works in your other social circles, but we can tell what you're doing and that's where the downvotes are coming from. And it makes me sad that a fellow libertarian is not being nuanced and holistic in their thinking.
not exactly, just trying to tear down the PR BS that they are feeding world, and people are accepting as truth.