(6.7 billion * 24 hours)/(350 million * 55 minutes) = 500
It's unclear how they're measuring time spent on the site, but most of Facebook's statistics seem to be honest (they only count active users, etc).
Let's give it a try. It's 10:26PM EST.
This is a very obscure phrase that no one else ever uses.
Maintaining a fresh index of the top 100k sites is where search engines get their best bang for the buck.
That said, it's not clear to me that humanity actually needs real-time search. Maybe there's some advertising value in winning the race to be #1 for "hudson plane crash" but is there really a business here?
With Twitter Search you can easily see the most recent results first.
I think it's a fairly recent feature, but it's there.
1) Some cretin camped on a domain and didn't have the courtesy to do a 301
2) PG is an asshole and ignores the Host header. HTTP/1.1 was a decade ago!
3) Google is a jackass and prefers a low-pagerank domain.
Maybe some asshat used Feedburner to proxy RSS via that domain?But there's more to it than that. Lectures suck as a means of learning about red-black trees. Unless the lecturer is literally world-class, I can better spend my time by watching the world-class version of the lecture on iTunes U. Or by reading the best book on the subject -- books move faster than lectures, except when you need to slow down and think, in which case they obligingly slow down for you.
Of course, while lectures are a fairly low-efficiency way to learn many subjects, it is necessary to give them at least a little attention in order to learn about what will be on the specific test that the professor will give you at the end of the term. And, of course, some lecturers are world-class. If you find one, put Facebook away, for god's sake!
Molecular and Cell Biology 140: General Genetics - Fall 2007 Audio
Fyodor Urnov, G. Garriga, R. Brem
Note: These people speak very fast.
That's a really good insight.
There needs to be a site where I can go to to watch the best possible explanation for any concept. Something like a Wikipedia for videos.
P.S. I don't mean to suggest people blowing off their classes to use Facebook is the way to go, but I think that to suggest it can't have value is somewhat silly.
I Facebook in a few of my classes. Sometimes it's because we're going over something I learned when I was younger. (I know how to use Final Cut, for instance, even if I'm completely clueless about sound/lighting setups on a movie set, so despite one class's being productive there're interludes where I don't need to focus as much.
I have other classes, however, where a good part of the focus seems to be on socializing. My entire major is devoted to entrepreneurialism; a huge part of the major is meeting other people and getting ideas going. So classes often have a relaxed environment in which people are encouraged to talk to one another. Facebook's useful there, also. I personally find it much easier to judge people and their ideas online; in person everybody seems beautiful and brilliant.
A huge part of what you get when you pay for college is access to all those people. Classes are valuable on one level specifically because they put you in a defined context with a slew of other people. I'm a people person, but I hate randomly going up to people, and I don't like talking to people without there being a reason for us to talk. Classes connect me to people, which is just as valuable service as the things I learn.
I'll also add that in the group I'm working with right now to launch things, all the communication's handled entirely over Facebook. We tried Backpack and Skype and Google Wave, and none of them could handle the conversation as well as informally talking to one another on Facebook did.
Ettercap, there's a plugin for that.
I think the point would be to direct them at their school's library page or, at the very least, wikipedia.
(Not that I ever did this).
Class time should be productive time. Work on something important instead of the low-bandwidth information exchange that is the lecture.
(6.7 billion * 24 hours)/(3 billion * 1 hour) = ~50
In fact, with India and China together having about 4 times as many TV households as the US, I bet the total is significantly higher than 3 billion hours, probably more like 10 or 20 billion (1/16 to 1/8 of humanity's time). http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/11/business/yourmoney/11india... http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/search/article_display.j...
1/5 of human life in the US is spent watching television. Probably around 5-10% of human life worldwide. Now that's cognitive surplus. Obligatory Clay Shirky link: http://www.shirky.com/herecomeseverybody/2008/04/looking-for...
It would take the equivalent of 500 human lives for 1 human life to be wasted on Facebook.
For some reason I'm just not feeling a response to this; though, I'm going to have to think about it some more.
About 60 000 American soldiers died in the Vietnam War, out of a total population of roughly 200 million Americans.
That works out to one American life lost for every 3333 (ish) Americans.
Even if we ignore the fact that Americans are almost certainly wildly overrepresented on Facebook relative to the rest of the world, the website is six times as destructive to the U.S.
Tongue firmly in cheek, incidentally.
I leave email clients, twitter, etc open a lot. By the raw numbers, it could be said that I spend more than half of my waking life using an email client.
[Edit] But that makes the figure no less staggering.
In high school, I was pretty shocked when my mom sat down with me and my buddies to play Tetris. And she actually whooped on us.
What was going on became very clear to me when her only complaint was that the controls weren't on a keyboard; she could only have gotten that good by wasting her time playing the game at some old job or school.
It is also funny to note that she had no conception of the competitive aspect of the multilayer modernization of Tetris, even though she was flailing bricks at us the entire time.
My Google account is still gone — turns out it wasn't giving me much value besides the email, and I hated my Gmail name so not much loss there. But I restored Facebook within 24 hours. I have too many people that I can't talk to in any other way. While I enjoyed the freedom, I enjoyed the friends much more.
So I restored my account, but deleted every friend I thought to be nonessential. I wound up with nine friends, each of whom I'm constantly in some state of conversation with. So I can't waste time as easily — I don't write notes as much, I'm rarely tagged in photos by them — but I'm still able to use it to talk.
That's what I love about Facebook's design. It's granular. You can choose to barely use it at all and it still gives you some value.
On the other hand, the mean is at least half of the median, so at least 1/1000 of humanity's time is spent on Facebook (if the other assumptions are correct).
1/500 of humanity's time spent with an open browser tab of Facebook doesn't seem nearly as impressive.
They know when you're sleeping
They know when you're awake
They know if you've been bad or good
So be good for goodness sake!