
“One billion people used Facebook in a single day” - gwintrob
https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10102329188394581
======
ajkjk
I 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.

~~~
jaredhansen
I don't blame you for hating this kind of talk since it doesn't actually say
much of anything of substance -- but to call it dishonest seems like a
stretch. What am I missing?

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.

~~~
ajkjk
The problem is that there's a huge elephant in the room: how much money this
kind of milestone represents.

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.

------
ljoshua
I'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.

~~~
aristus
Back when I worked there, I "audited" the systems that count Facebook's active
users. I needed to analyze code efficiency and feature growth over long
periods of time, and so needed very accurate user counts in order to subtract
user growth.

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.

~~~
bigtones
They are not talking about active users. The metric quoted was "used Facebook
in a single day". I know for a fact that they count any "Like" click or any
Facebook comment on any web page on the internet when they quote "used
Facebook". It does not mean logged into one of their apps.

~~~
aristus
I personally audited the entire pipeline, and code, from collection to
analysis all the way to the little DAU ("daily active users") graph that
informs this number. That experience, and years of working on related data
sets inside Facebook, are enough to convince me that the 1B number is legit.

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.

~~~
lifeisstillgood
You both seem to be saying the same thing - actively clicking on a like button
gets counted as a real genuine user of Facebook. That seems reasonable (one is
logged in, and clicks something sending data to FB)

Neither of you have said just having FB button appear on a 3rd party site
counts - that would get what 3bn users :-)

~~~
aristus
I think so, rereading. But many people assume that simply visiting a page with
a widget counts.

------
peterjlee
Congrats to Facebook! Instead of poking holes to that number or saying
something negative, I'm just going to say Congrats.

------
benwerd
Which means at least as many people used the web. Good going, Internet!

~~~
motti_s
Not necessarily, Facebook has mobile clients.

~~~
renownedmedia
Facebook mobile clients don't use the Internet?

~~~
cryptoz
The web is not the same as the Internet, though. The web is an open platform
built on open protocols on top of the Internet.

~~~
StavrosK
Interesting question: What is the Web? HTTP, or HTTP+HTML? Facebook mobile
clients use HTTP, so are they using the web?

~~~
andrepd
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web)

~~~
StavrosK
Huh, this Wikipedia site is pretty nifty, I didn't know I could look stuff up
on it, thanks!

~~~
andrepd
You're welcome!

------
guelo
To 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
To paraphrase Han Solo, "yeah, but who's gonna pay for it, kid? You?"

~~~
KingMob
Once 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.

~~~
onewaystreet
> In Africa, Facebook Zero is trying to create the illusion that there's no
> other Internet, just Facebook.

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.

------
TazeTSchnitzel
When the Facebook hack comes, it will be devastating.

~~~
gpcz
Getting in might be possible, but then the attacker would have to covertly
exfiltrate and store all of Facebook's content to do a dump. Does J. Random
Attacker have enough storage to do this?

~~~
0942v8653
Maybe; realistically, the Internet speed would probably be more of a limiting
factor. At mine, it would take almost a week to fill up 1 terabyte of storage.
That's plenty of time to go get a few more HDDs. At 1 Gbps you'd have about 2
hours.

~~~
gpcz
I think you're underestimating the scale of this problem.

According to
[http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2013/01/18/faceb...](http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2013/01/18/facebook-
builds-new-data-centers-for-cold-storage/) , 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.

~~~
0942v8653
If you were bent on getting it all, even at 1 Gbps:

(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

~~~
yellowapple
You can split that across multiple attackers, though. A botnet of 58 machines
would be able to do it in about a year by that math. Once you cross into the
thousands, a full dump like this is suddenly feasible.

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.

------
lifeisstillgood
As 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
What'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.

~~~
dump100
Will 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
That'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.

------
nabaraz
There 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/)

------
myth_buster

      used Facebook in a single day
    

Just to clarify, is that fb.com, messenger, whatsapp, comment widgets etc
combined?

~~~
why-el
I 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
If 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
Exactly, 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.

------
acct123
Just 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.

------
weavie
To 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.

~~~
Dysprosium
Seems like our brain think in log.

~~~
andreyf
That's probably because the size of decimal digits written down on a piece of
paper is in log.

------
tomvbussel
I wonder how they got that number. If getting Android notifications counts as
'using Facebook' then I'm one of those one billion.

~~~
r3bl
Well, 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"?

------
civilian
Given 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.

------
smaili
Regardless 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
Without 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.

~~~
rev_bird
I'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.

------
lexcorvus
This 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/ur...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/urbit-
dev/zuck/urbit-dev/krwrSf0Mwoc/-VmPwxA1RTsJ)

------
brayton
What are the next closest products in terms of single day user count?

~~~
alecdbrooks
Taken 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
And the size of a drink. A packaged item? Or 8oz?

------
listingboat
If this is logins, that's 1 million logins every 86.4 seconds on average

~~~
alanh
It’s not. :) Facebook logins last a _long_ time. Shorter sessions would reduce
usage / addiction

------
alan_cx
Are users of sites which use facebook authentication included?

------
hanniabu
That comes down to an average of 11,574 logins a second...

~~~
hk__2
No. We’re talking about 1B users per day, not 1B logins per day.

~~~
hanniabu
Sorry, assumed logins inferred unique logins.

------
furyofantares
And how many robots?

~~~
onewaystreet
Less 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
Interesting. 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?

------
sombremesa
From 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_
I'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.

------
cft
If 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
Why do you have 20 accounts?

~~~
cft
For 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.

------
mamon
...and I wasn't among them :) gave up Facebook long time ago.

------
hsnewman
I for one was not one of them. I closed my account years ago and haven't
looked back. "Oh, look at the cute photo!"

------
jgalt212
3.2 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
I think you underestimate the scale of Facebook to be honest. It's MASSIVE.

~~~
jgalt212
I think you may be underestimating the amount of facebook attrition over the
past 3-4 years.

~~~
hk__2
Do you have any data on that?

~~~
civilian
He 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
ok, 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.

~~~
civilian
I don't understand how FB revenue per customer relates to your original issue?
"Let's attack this problem"\--- what's the problem? Are you saying that
facebook user attrition is lowering revenue per customer, even though they're
still logging?

\--- 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.

~~~
jgalt212
> you're just doing your best to tear down facebook

not exactly, just trying to tear down the PR BS that they are feeding world,
and people are accepting as truth.

------
JoeAltmaier
Wait - half a billion of those were my sons, polling the site every 50
milliseconds

