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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."

34 of 107 comments (clear)

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

    A Lot of wasted time...

    1. Re:wow... by boneclinkz · · Score: 5, Funny

      Are you telling me that finally answering the question "which Jersey Shore character are you?", via 106-question interactive quiz, is somehow a waste of time?

      Some of us are working on a legacy to pass along, you know. When you great-great-grandchildren look at their mother and ask "mom, was great-great-granddad more like Mike 'The Situation' or D.J. Pauly D?" will she have an answer? Or will she have to look down at her feet in shame and whisper "I don't know."?

    2. 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.

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

      Improve global productivity by 16 billion minutes a day.

      Seize facebook and shut it down.

    4. Re:wow... by wvmarle · · Score: 5, Interesting

      That would be 40 minutes per user per day.

      I think it is quite reasonable to assume that half of the registered users is not using the site at all - maybe more - people lose interest, sign up for a one-time must see page, whatever. And unused accounts are not deleted of course. I am one of the less active users; I have an account and spend maybe five minutes a week on Facebook, if that much.

      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. I don't even waste that much time on slashdot.

      Viewing a million photos per second is more believable. I just opened my own Facebook page and found over 30 photos in the "news feed" alone. And I bet they count them all, thumbnails included. So take that as average: 30 photos on a page. And for an active Facebook browser one page every 15 seconds on average, I doubt they linger much. That is two photos a second they are "viewing". That requires 500,000 users online on average to reach that 1 mln photos a second.

      Now take that back to the time spent online: 1440 minutes in a day; 500,000 out of 400 mln actually online, that makes an average of 1.8 minutes per registered user per day to get to the required half million users online at any one moment. Hey that sounds much more reasonable to me already. And that would give me a total of a mere 720 mln minutes wasted per day on Facebook. That's a whopping two orders of magnitude off of the claimed 16 bln. My numbers may be guesstimates but I can't imagine I'm two orders of magnitude off.

      Now to think of the amount of time I wasted on this posting...

    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 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...

    7. Re:wow... by RavenChild · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I work in a computer lab on my university campus. I sit in the lab for 3-5 hours a few days a week. With this kind of time, I have noticed many people come in and read/post on facebook for at least an hour every day (I have seen people using facebook for my entire shifts).

      When I notice a line starting for computers, I go around and ask the people I noticed spending too much time on facebook to let those in line have a chance. I always do this politely but even though they have spent an hour or two on facebook, I am always met with a look of disgust. Some of those people have even started yelling at me and others I've had to call campus police to escort out. It really seems as if many people have a mental addiction to social networks like facebook. They fear that they will miss something important if they aren't watching the news feed 24/7.

      Those are the type of people that I see when I'm working the lab that lead me to believe these statistics just a bit. 16 billion seems too big but I can believe at least 3-5 billion minutes are spent on facebook a day just from the people I see in the labs.

      Now something I do agree with you with respect to the pictures viewed is that facebook may also be counting the time people are logged into the facebook chat or just have a facebook window open. I know I leave firefox open all the time with facebook somewhere in my assortment of tabs.

    8. Re:wow... by davester666 · · Score: 3, Funny

      Yes, if anything, they will be average-average-insignificant-children...

      --
      Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
  2. What a waste... by jhouserizer · · Score: 3, Funny

    Just imagine the fun they could all be having with Pac-Man instead...

    1. Re:What a waste... by ninjacheeseburger · · Score: 2, Interesting

      16 billion / 400 million = 40 minutes per person?
      That's a lot of farm-ville.
      I probably spend 3-5 mins checking if I have any messages or events, and then quickly scroll down to see if anything important is going on.

    2. Re:What a waste... by JustOK · · Score: 4, Funny

      and if you ever find something that is important, do let us know.

      --
      rewriting history since 2109
    3. 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.
    4. Re:What a waste... by numbski · · Score: 4, Funny

      This is quickly turning into a time-wasting recursion loop. We're now doing math *on Slashdot* on the amount of time people spending wasting time on Facebook.

      The only thing missing here is for this to be on idle.slashdot.org, not tech.slashdot.org. :P

      --

      Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).

    5. Re:What a waste... by TheRaven64 · · Score: 3, Funny

      The only thing missing here is for this to be on idle.slashdot.org, not tech.slashdot.org. :P

      No, idle will run a story about the amount of time that people waste on Slashdot.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  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.
    1. Re:No we don't. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

      I just run a bot which watches all pictures on facebook to screw up their statistics.
      And then I laugh: "ha-ha! Where is your statistical interpretation now! Ha!Ha!"

    2. Re:No we don't. by aldld · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Well, I know a lot of non-geeks who often open up a browser window, go to Facebook (or some other sites), and when they go do something else leave the window and don't bother closing it. Eventually they forget about it and they end up having Facebook open for hours, or sometimes even days.

    3. Re:No we don't. by Andy+Dodd · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I just had a comment from a coworker that I always seemed to be online. I replied that I used Facebook's XMPP support and was logged in to it from an IM client, even when I wasn't actually at the computer. (My home computer has Pidgin running almost constantly.)

      In addition to that, my home machine usually has Facebook open in a tab in Firefox. Facebook and GMail are pretty much my "always open even when out of the house" tabs.

      --
      retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
    4. Re:No we don't. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

      So basically your coworker suggested that you have no life, and lo and behold, they were right.

    5. Re:No we don't. by IsoRashi · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I'm not sure I really understand your post. It seems like you think the numbers are inflated because some people are "on" facebook 24/7 but not actively using the site all the time. Yet 16 billion minutes among 400 million users is only 40 minutes per user. That doesn't sound too preposterous to me.

      --
      This is not the greatest sig in the world, no. This is just a tribute.
  4. facebook no more by stanlyb · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I have a Facebook account only to be in touch with some friends of mine......and the only "activity" that i see on my page is some smallville, zoo-ville or whatever-ville game post/request. Thank you, but no thank you. I am considering closing my account sooner than later, and i suppose there are a lot other people intending to do same.

    1. Re:facebook no more by Zarf_is_with_you · · Score: 2, Funny



      "I Swear if you send me another Farmville Invitation I will slaughter your Cows"

      http://tinyurl.com/252stgq

    2. Re:facebook no more by RManning · · Score: 2, Informative

      I have a Facebook account only to be in touch with some friends of mine......and the only "activity" that i see on my page is some smallville, zoo-ville or whatever-ville game post/request. Thank you, but no thank you. I am considering closing my account sooner than later, and i suppose there are a lot other people intending to do same.

      All those game updates were driving me nuts too, until I found out you can hide them. When you see those, click on the "Hide" button and then choose to hide all posts from that app. It'll make your Facebook experience much less crapy.

    3. Re:facebook no more by mobets · · Score: 3, Informative

      FB Purity does a pretty good job of keeping these hidden. That way you don't have to keep seeing / hiding them when your friends switch to yet another farm game.

      --

      It was me, I did it, I moved your cheese
  5. lol by Pojut · · Score: 3, Funny

    I spent 16 billion minutes with your mom. ::does the math:: wait...

    --
    Living With a Nerd
  6. 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.

    1. Re:Active minutes or browser minutes? by gstoddart · · Score: 2, Funny

      Anyway, looks like I'm an outlier. I log in to Facebook once or twice a week for 5-10 minutes

      No, I'm an outlier. I don't have a facebook account, and have no interest whatsoever in the damned thing. :-P

      --
      Lost at C:>. Found at C.
  7. FB == 40 minutes/day, Slashdot == ??? by southpolesammy · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Dare we ask how much time the average Slashdot user spends here per day?

    --
    Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.
  8. Facebook takes lives every day - 380, to be exact by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    Given that Facebook usage is currently 16,000,000,000 minutes per day, and that the average life of a human being is approximately 42,048,000 minutes (60 minutes per hour * 24 hours per day * 365 days per year * 80 years of life on average [est.]), this means Facebook effectively sucks up the time-equivalent of the lives of a bit more than 380 people. Every. Single. Day. FACEBOOK MUST BE STOPPED!!!!1!1!1111oneoneone

  9. 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)

  10. Economic impact by nickovs · · Score: 4, Funny

    I wonder how many of these minutes are spent at work. Consider that 16 billion minutes a day, at US$10 per hour, is just shy of $1 Trillion a year. Has anyone else noticed the correlation between the rise Facebook and the global economic meltdown?

    --
    If intelligent life is too complex to evolve on its own, who designed God?
  11. 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

  12. Facebook moving into junk food by Animats · · Score: 3, Interesting

    There are now YoVille gummi bears and brownies. There's a Mafia Wars Slurpee. Farmville ice cream. At your nearby 7-11 now. Really. Each comes with a Secret Code which, when typed into the game, unlocks some game item.

    You have to admire Facebook from scaling up from a college photo book. It's also impressive that they can actually make their back end systems work, once you realize what's going on in there.