The World Spends 0.2% Of Its Time On Facebook | Hacker News Reader

The World Spends 0.2% Of Its Time On Facebook

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And of course, the number will be higher per-person for people who actually use Facebook, because you have to exclude those without it or without internet.

Higher? I believe it will be much higher, which is quite concerning.

Is this another one of those stats that is supposed to divert people's attention away from facebook's inability to produce income at a level that justifies its valuation? Because even if it's one of those, it's not very impressive.

If they are including tab/window open and idling, then it's not really fair. It's kind of like presuming that a magazine is being constantly read from the moment it enters your house to the moment it leaves in the rubbish bin.

Another obscene stat - We've Spent 5.93M Years Playing WoW... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IiE2czrG0MI

Jane McGonigal, author of Reality Is Broken, points to the 3 billion hours the world invests every week in online gaming as a clear indicator that many people are not being sufficiently challenged in their day-to-day lives. "5.93 million years is how long people have spent tackling unnecessary obstacles in World of Warcraft," says McGonigal. "We've spent as long playing World of Warcraft as we have evolving as a human species."

>"We've spent as long playing World of Warcraft as we have evolving as a human species."

That's obviously a meaningless and unfair comparison (world time vs. cumulative individual time). Here's a better one: how much cumulative time has been spent watching and playing baseball? If it's more than 5.93M years, is baseball evidence for the same thing? Is any form of recreation evidence that reality is broken?

From the numbers on the site, it works out to 90 seconds of Facebook per day.

No really. This is useless.

Even if you assumed that 20% of the population uses 80% of the Facebook time, amongst that 20% you're at ~6 minutes per person per day.

Still useless. I spend at least that amount of time sitting on the toilet. More than twice that time waiting for public transit. I 'waste' 20 minutes every night lying in bed waiting to fall asleep. It takes me 5 minutes to make 'instant ramen'.

Ok, finally. Facebook claims 800 million users. Let's assume half of them are fake. That gives an overall average of just over half an hour per person per day. If we apply the 20/80 rule, the top 20% spend an average of 105 minutes on Facebook a day.

I guess that's a bit better.

The world spending 90 seconds a day on one task is... not really that ridiculous. I mean, I bet the world spends 90 seconds a day praying towards Mecca. (By rough math, it would require each Muslism in the world to spend roughly 10 minutes a day praying...).

> Ok, finally. Facebook claims 800 million users. Let's assume half of them are fake.

I'd assume the 800M is active (non fake) users. They probably have billions of accounts.

I think a more useful statistic would be time spent per active Facebook user.

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