Slashdot Mirror
Facebook Usage Hits 16 Billion Minutes a Day
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."
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.
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."?
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...