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Facebook Usage Hits 16 Billion Minutes a Day

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the thats-a-lotta-waste dept.

1sockchuck writes "Facebook's 400 million users spend more than 16 billion minutes on the site every day, and view 1 million photos every second. That's prompted massive growth in the social network's infrastructure, which now encompasses more than 60,000 servers. Facebook's Tom Cook discussed how the company's operations team manages that growth in a presentation last week at the O"Reilly Velocity conference (video). The next day at Structure 2010, Facebook Vice President of Operations Jonathan Heiliger said server and chip makers have 'come a long way' in supporting cloud platforms since he bashed them last year."

14 of 107 comments (clear)

  1. wow... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    A Lot of wasted time...

    1. Re:wow... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      A Lot of wasted time...

      And a lot of wasted bandwidth too...
      They could read slashdot instead and learn about FB's privacy issues.

    2. Re:wow... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Improve global productivity by 16 billion minutes a day.

      Seize facebook and shut it down.

    3. Re:wow... by mcgrew · · Score: 1, Insightful

      ...says the AC on slashdot!

      --
      Free Martian Whores!
    4. Re:wow... by Mitchell314 · · Score: 1, Insightful

      Yes.

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      I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
    5. Re:wow... by eulernet · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I think it is quite reasonable to assume that half of the registered users is not using the site at all

      I think the 80/20 rule applies here.
      That is: 20% of registered people use Facebook daily, and use 80% of the resources.

    6. Re:wow... by seanalltogether · · Score: 1, Insightful

      Please tell us more about all the pointless guesstimates you've derived this week. You basically tried to refute facebooks numbers with nothing more then "if i do x a certain way, so does everyone else". And then just piled on assumption after assumption to arrive at nothing.

    7. Re:wow... by s.d. · · Score: 4, Insightful

      So that would mean that every active user would spend almost 1 1/2 hours per day surfing that site. On average. Which falls for me in the "bullshit" category. Just totally unbelievable.

      Why is this unbelievable? Just because you don't play games on the site for 3 hours a day doesn't mean other people don't...

  2. Impressive by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    That's a lot of completely wasted time and resources.

    1. Re:Impressive by MobileTatsu-NJG · · Score: 2, Insightful

      That's a lot of completely wasted time and resources.

      Heh. "I just thought I'd come onto Slashdot and spend 20 seconds talking about how reading and posting on another site is a complete waste of time and resources."

      --

      "I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)

  3. No we don't. by chickenrob · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Many of us use tabbed browsers on desktops that run 24/7 with a facebook tab open.

    --
    People say my sig is the best thing about me.
  4. Active minutes or browser minutes? by Fnkmaster · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Are those *active* minutes where the user has actually taken some sort of physical action in the last 60 seconds or so or are those just minutes where a browser is connected to Facebook (i.e. their Javascript polling mechanism in place)?

    Anyway, looks like I'm an outlier. I log in to Facebook once or twice a week for 5-10 minutes, get rapidly disgusted, and leave. I used to leave Facebook logged in a lot and check it once every hour or two, then I realized it had become too much of a distraction and that when I left it logged in they used my login cookie for all these other unrelated sites on the web to push scarily personal information about what my Facebook-friends were doing on the web, so I blocked all that FB connect BS with Adblock and stopped leaving Facebook logged in when I wasn't actually using it. Realized how much time I was wasting with that crap too.

  5. Re:What a waste... by Mikkeles · · Score: 2, Insightful

    '... and then quickly scroll down to see if anything important is going on.'

    And??? Is it ever?

    --
    Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
  6. Before we get the cries of "what a waste" by jareth-0205 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    People have lots of free time. Atleast Facebook means they're engaged in communicating with other people.

    http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/010218.html