The thing is that nobody actually behaves based on what happens on facebook. Nobody buys a product because a bunch of people "like" it. Heck, most people can't even remember any of the last 100 posts they read (try it - interrupt someone who's surfing facebook, and ask them to recall what they were reading. Their brain is in "zoned-out mode" - for the most part nothing they read really registers).
We're in a "social media bubble", one which will collapse when advertisers realize that they can get better returns by spending their "social media budget" on booze and returning the empties for a refund.
Geez, it's not even a question of right or wrong - just distinguishing between slang and proper use in context. And it's not that important in the great scheme of things (which I think I was trying to point out). Like I said, the original post was for laughs (along with making a passing point about corporate regulatory capture - you know, using humour to make a point?), and I think most people took it that way.
But some wanted to get all pedantic, so I pointed out that the original article said nothing whatsoever about passing (or drafting) new laws - none of the words "drafting", "new", or "law" were in the actual article, and that if people really wanted to be so picky, their notion of "drafting laws", while it's common usage, is wrong in this one context.
It's like the freetards who insist on calling it "GNU/Linux", when they don't do the same in any other area of life. They don't call it a Mazda/Ford when Mazda makes the engine, or a GeneralElectric/Boeing, or a Sealtest/Cappuccino, and if they really wanted to be more accurate, they should refer to distros as Apple/GNU/Linux, because most distros use CUPS, which is owned by Apple. Or FreeBSD/Adobe/AppleGNU/IBM/AT&T/Linux... or they can just do like everyone else, and just call it Linux.
Just like they could have either taken the original post in the spirit it was obviously meant, or alternatively, actually read the article and realized that the summary was a troll. Like so many slashdot articles that are binspam or linkbait or just downright lies (like the article that claimed tetris in 140 bytes, when if you actually counted the bytes, it was closer to 1k).
Anyway, like I said, the original post was just an attempt to draw attention to Facebooks' attempts at regulatory capture (same as their attempts to illegally claim over-broad rights to the terms "Book", etc). Too many people think that just because some site has a ToS, that it's legally binding, or somehow establishes a precedent, when in fact no ToS can over-ride local laws or public policy. It's like people who believe that EULAs are the governing contract, interpreted w/o reference to local laws that prohibit portions of them (YMMV depending on jurisdiction) or that they cannot return boxed software because a sign in the store says they can't "because of copyright law" - also not true, because I've forced them to take back crappy retail software that doesn't do what it says it does, and gotten a complete refund despite both the sign and the receipt saying otherwise.
You're a rarity. Most people don't bother culling accounts - their innate insecurity, which led them to friend total strangers in the first place to bolster their sense of self-worth, prevents that.
This sort of behaviour leads to some funny results. One of my friends, as part of a study, was asked to contact - by phone - a bunch of people picked at random from a person's friends list for a marketing project. These were all people the person had said they knew because "I don't just friend anybody..." Not one of them knew the guy.
itâ(TM)s easy to buy âoefriendsâ and âoefollowers,â by the thousands, and âoelikesâ by the tens of thousands, for a low fee. This can jumpstart a marketing campaign if it makes it onto a top trending list. Buying such services will also help contractors meet performance goals set by clients and trigger payments. It can be a lucrative arbitrage.
The result however, is considerable inflation in the numbers of users of all the major social networks and platforms.
The operators of the networks: Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc, must know who is real and who isnâ(TM)t. They have usage data that shows telltale signs of a fake account. They also know how much information a user has disclosed, and how many user profiles are empty.
Whatâ(TM)s not known is how they count the many types of users, how rigorous is their analysis? There is no transparency on the single most important pool of information for their commercial customers.
The top 18? One only has revenue of $2,295 a year
on
Open Source Payday
·
· Score: 0
FTFA: Open Source Applications Foundation: Revenue of $2,295.00 That's dollars, not thousands of dollars. That's as close to "no money" as makes no difference. Anyone making that little a year is on food stamps or living in mom's basement.
Another: The Open Source Initiative: $40,334.00 a year revenue. This is some kind of a joke, right?
If this is the top 18, don't bother with the bottom 999,982. It's not worth the electrons.
Apple makes 10x as much per day as the all the "Top 18" combined do in a year.
Heck, even Angry Birds makes more than twice as much as all of them combined.
Seriously, ecomstation? - Give me a break. I haven't seen anyone buying that in... well, not since I bought OS/2 2.1 more than 15 years ago. Even the banks have abandoned it. You'd be just as well off citing Plan9 or BeOS... nobody takes them seriously either.
Also, you're simply wrong - the government defines a monopoly as having more than 80% to 90% market share - Windows does have a monopoly. Once you have that much market control, you can extract monopoly profits. The existence of a tick on a flea like ecomstation is irrelevant hand-waving, and doesn't change the fact that the dominant vendor is in control of the market, and getting those monopoly profits.
That linux allows itself to be corrupted in a way that survives killing firefox is the fault of Linux (for defective Linux code) or of hardware manufacturers (for defective driver code).
I've seen it happen too many times. While I *am* posting this from firefox on linux, I also log out regularly because firefox is unstable, and it does corrupt other parts of the system. It's not "just a Windows problem," unfortunately, and their "rapid release cycle" only aggravates the problem.
You still don't get it - what the general public is "drafting" isn't a bill. It's merely a proposal for what will, if submitted by a member of Congress, become a draft bill. It's a nuanced difference, but a difference nonetheless. Just because we're normally careless in our use of language doesn't mean we should be when referring to a specific problem domain where the terms are clearly defined. It would be like a non-programmer (or too many programmers) who don't know the difference between html and real code, and go around saying that they're programmers when all they do is make static web pages.
Perhaps a better example would be the way people used to call themselves Microsoft Certified Software Engineers - totally illegal for Microsoft to certify them as such in various jurisdictions, from Texas to Quebec, because the title "Engineer" is reserved solely for engineers who are licensed by the professional body of the state.
I got fed up with this illegal practice, and emailed the governing body that since Microsoft could do it, I would too - that I was going to charge $100 to certify anyone who wanted it as a software engineer. Sure enough, they showed up at my door the next day threatening all sorts of legal action. I told them that I was on their side, but that if they didn't go after Microsoft, I would go ahead and they could haul me into court, and then have to explain to a judge how come Microsoft could break the law with impunity for years and I couldn't.
Sure enough, they had no choice - Microsoft was forced to withdraw the designation here. So terms are important when it comes to specific fields - in this case, Facebook certainly cannot "draft a law", just a proposal. It's a fine point, but it's a valid one.
All that being said, I only made my original post to be tongue-in-cheek funny, not to get into a drawn-out discussion of the finer points of terms - maybe slashdot needs to implement emoticons? Or at least a "set this background to OMGPoniesPink so nobody takes this post too seriously" option;-p
And while we're at it, could we also have an option to distinguish slashvertisement "stories" and binspam? I try to kill them off in the firehose when I see them, but so many people obviously just go by the story title, and don't go to the site and see that it's mostly link-bait copied from somewhere else and plastered with ads and should properly be labeled "notthebest" (along with an option to submit the original link source).
One thing I've noticed is that people are cut-and-pasting earlier submissions, in the hope that people voting in the firehose won't notice the earlier submission. Talk about karma whoring...:-( Oh well, enjoy the rest of the weekend. TTYL
You conveniently ignore the evidence that people can buy facebook fans in bulk. There's a market for it because of developers engaging in fraud - being paid for "performance", where the performance metric is a specific number of facebook fans.
You also has still failed to provide a single audited number, because you can't. Facebook could provide this number, but they don't because they know that the majority of their accounts are either fake or inactive. Their silence speaks volumes.
Don't forget - they could end this immediately by introducing strong account verification. They won't, because it would destroy the perceived value of their business.
Now it's interesting that you insist on dismissing every link that pointed to people with multiple facebook accounts as "mere anecdotal evidence", when it shows that people can and do have multiple accounts, specifically for things like game "pharming" and "marketing". Why? Is it that important to you personally to discredit anyone who points out the truth - that facebook is lying? Shill much?
If I call Linux-that-isn't-Android-or-embedded "Linux", that seems to draw the pedants out
So what? People who use the term "GNU/Linux" also come across a pedants. 6 of one, half a dozen of the other... it's like the people who go on and on about "M$" and "Micro$oft" - it was cute in the beginning, but now it's seen as just lame and childish and bitter.
The application-and-drivers gap will always be there. There's no financial incentive to fix it, not for an operating system that, after 20 years, you can't even give away to the vast majority of people. Sure, I use it (posting from Fedora 16) but I'm a very small minority - when one distro breaks too much, I can always switch to another. Most users would just throw up their hands and say "this is crap" and either go back to Windows or on to Apple.
I can't blame them - Linux simply isn't all that good for anything but infrastructure. It's too forked, with everyone scratching their own itch, and nobody fixing the real problems that keep it from desktop adoption. Linux simply will never be ready for the mainstream, not without a pretty barrier (such as android) between it and the user - and even android now sucks because of the same fragmentation problem, but this time with the handset manufacturers.
It's too bad, but we had our shot when Vista bombed, and we lost. Now there's nothing shabby about being #1 in supercomputing, and #1 in web serving, and #1 in other fields, so why even stress about the desktop numbers? Linux is below 1% (anyone who dual-boots should only be counted as a half-user), and it will never rise above that, so what? You don't see Linus worrying about it one bit. If he's not worried, why should you or I be? Enjoy the rest of the weekend:-)
if Newt is winning the Twitter primary, it's because of voter fraud. A former staffer tells us that his campaign hired a firm to boost his follower count, in part by creating fake accounts en masse:
Newt employs a variety of agencies whose sole purpose is to procure Twitter followers for people who are shallow/insecure/unpopular enough to pay for them. As you might guess, Newt is most decidedly one of the people to which these agencies cater.
About 80 percent of those accounts are inactive or are dummy accounts created by various "follow agencies," another 10 percent are real people who are part of a network of folks who follow others back and are paying for followers themselves (Newt's profile just happens to be a part of these networks because he uses them, although he doesn't follow back), and the remaining 10 percent may, in fact, be real, sentient people who happen to like Newt Gingrich. If you simply scroll through his list of followers you'll see that most of them have odd usernames and no profile photos, which has to do with the fact that they were mass generated. Pathetic, isn't it?
While it would be impossible to survey all of Gingrich"s followers, a cursory glance immediately turned up a few accounts that featured odd names, no personal information, no followers, no posts, and a small follow list. And there's certainly a healthy market out there for buying Twitter followers, either by hiring a company to strategically follow accounts that will follow you back or by paying for dummy accounts.
It's all a scam. So, why not produce some proof - audited numbers - to show that this isn't the case? Because you can't - all social media numbers are bogus - Facebook, Twitter, Google+ - you can buy as many followers as you can afford.
The hollow emptiness in social media numbers - most accounts are fake or empty
He and his assistant discovered that only 30% published anything on G+ and only 6% were "outright spammers." But the largest group he classed as,
Ghosts. 36% had not even filled out a profile.
Mr Kelly pointed to a study by two journalists at Popular Mechanics that only 25% of their Twitter followers were real, and 49% were fake or spam.
And this is a widespread problem:
Presidential candidate Newt Gingrich claims to have 1.3 million followers. But last August a group at Indiana University did an analysis of some of the 2012 Presidential candidates and found that 76% of Gingrich's 1.3 million Twitter accounts lacked a profile biography.
The rise in fake users is directly related to corporate marketing campaigns that aim for large numbers of followers, 'likes,' and to show high levels of online engagement.
This has given rise to a growing services sector where it's easy to buy "friends" and "followers," by the thousands, and 'likes" by the tens of thousands, for a low fee. This can jumpstart a marketing campaign if it makes it onto a top trending list. Buying such services will also help contractors meet performance goals set by clients and trigger payments. It can be a lucrative arbitrage.
The result however, is considerable inflation in the numbers of users of all the major social networks and platforms.
Social media is a scam, same as SEO. Get over it. Facebook has less than 250 million active users, and they are a really low-quality demographic - people who have nothing better to do than bolster their low self-esteem by accumulating "friends" on facebook, and spammers.
It's easy to show that facebooks numbers are inflated - I disabled my account months ago, and yet they still send me emails every frigging day with people who have shared a link with me, or others who are now friends with someone I know.
If that's not padding the numbers, what is?
Also, all you have to do is search for "buy facebook fans". When you can buy 10,000 fans for $100 or less, it's because they're bots. How hard is it to figure out, mkay?
Now, why don't you provide some proof that facebook's user numbers are audited? Because you can't - they're bogus and facebook knows it.
Linux. It's what the vast majority of people call it. Just like they call it Android, not Bionic/Android/Dalvik/Linux. Same as they call it OSX, and not FreeBSD/OSX. Same as they call it Windows, and not Mach/Windows (or in times past, DOS/Windows).
The c library is replaceable, same as the tires on your car are replaceable with a different make, and we don't call it a Firestone/Ford, and when you change the tires, a Bridgestone/Ford. Or if the engine is made by Mazda, a Mazda/Ford.
What a liar - nowhere on the linked page does that "quote" exist:
|| III. Sources of Legislation ||
Sources of ideas for legislation are unlimited and proposed drafts of bills originate in many diverse quarters. Primary among these is the idea and draft conceived by a Member. This may emanate from the election campaign during which the Member had promised, if elected, to introduce legislation on a particular subject. The Member may have also become aware after taking office of the need for amendment to or repeal of an existing law or the enactment of a statute in an entirely new field.
In addition, the Member's constituents, either as individuals or through citizen groups, may avail themselves of the right to petition and transmit their proposals to the Member. The right to petition is guaranteed by the First Amendment to the Constitution. Similarly, state legislatures may ''memorialize'' Congress to enact specified federal laws by passing resolutions to be transmitted to the House and Senate as memorials. If favorably impressed by the idea, a Member may introduce the proposal in the form in which it has been submitted or may redraft it. In any event, a Member may consult with the Legislative Counsel of the House or the Senate to frame the ideas in suitable legislative language and form.
In modern times, the ''executive communication'' has become a prolific source of legislative proposals. The communication is usually in the form of a message or letter from a member of the President's Cabinet, the head of an independent agency, or the President himself, transmitting a draft of a proposed bill to the Speaker of the House of Representatives and the President of the Senate. Despite the structure of separation of powers, Article II, Section 3, of the Constitution imposes an obligation on the President to report to Congress from time to time on the ''State of the Union'' and to recommend for consideration such measures as the President considers necessary and expedient. Many of these executive communications follow on the President's message to Congress on the state of the Union. The communication is then referred to the standing committee or committees having jurisdiction of the subject matter of the proposal. The chairman or the ranking minority member of the relevant committee often introduces the bill, either in the form in which it was received or with desired changes. This practice is usually followed even when the majority of the House and the President are not of the same political party, although there is no constitutional or statutory requirement that a bill be introduced to effectuate the recommendations.
The most important of the regular executive communications is the annual message from the President transmitting the proposed budget to Congress. The President's budget proposal, together with testimony by officials of the various branches of the government before the Appropriations Committees of the House and Senate, is the basis of the several appropriation bills that are drafted by the Committees on Appropriations of the House and Senate.
The drafting of statutes is an art that requires great skill, knowledge, and experience. In some instances, a draft is the result of a study covering a period of a year or more by a commission or committee designated by the President or a member of the Cabinet. The Administrative Procedure Act and the Uniform Code of Military Justice are two examples of enactments resulting from such studies. In addition, congressional committees sometimes draft bills after studies and hearings covering periods of a year or more.
Wrong - I provided links to people who admit to running multiple accounts - and I used to work at a place that ran multiple accounts as well, for "marketing purposes." So shove it, fat boy.
Microsoft continues to be the only vendor to sell stand-alone desktop operating systems that are not tied to hardware.
You mean other than Canonical or Red Hat? The only way GNU/Linux or FreeBSD could possibly be called "tied to hardware" would be as part of a complaint about poor driver support by some peripheral manufacturers.
Try again. Neither one of them has even 1/100 of 1% of desktop market sales (sales, as opposed to downloads - but even if we included the free downloads, either of them will have a hard time breaking that 1/10 of 1% mark). So, a few thousand sales in a market where Microsoft sells hundreds of millions really de minimus. Also, selling a support contract is not the same - Microsoft is quite happy (and profitable) selling just a bare OS, no support.
BTW - it's not GNU/Linux, any more than your car is called a Michelin/Ford - but if you want to go that route, feel free to call it Apple/BSD/GNU/Linux - there's Apple-owned stuff in the typical linux distro - essential stuff like cups.;-)
1. Apple's resurgence was due to the iPod, a market that Microsoft didn't have any hardware that could compete with. Microsoft continues to be the only vendor to sell stand-alone desktop operating systems that are not tied to hardware. The "Microsoft browser monopoly" never existed (Netscape had a near-monopoly at first, remember?).
2. KMart never had a retail monopoly. Until it merged with Sears, the two were always competitors in the down-market retail sector, and sears was the leader for decades.
3. "The DVD/Bluray Consortium Monopoly" is total BS - that's like arguing "The Hard Drive/SSD Consortium Monopoly" or "The Car and Truck Monopoly". If you want to make such a comparison, I'll do the same with the "7 laptop manufacturers in Taiwan with factories in China" who actually DO have a world-wide monopoly. But does any one of them have a monopoly? No - they compete like crazy.
4. You could "go on and on", and maybe eventually you'll find some valid examples, but these were not them.
I challenge you right now to give an example of a company that held its monopoly more than 20 years. (You won't find any because it doesn't exist; the free market is self-correcting. High priced costs lead customers to seek lower-cost alternatives.)
So please explain how IBM continues to not just monopolize the mainframe, but grow it over more than half a century, if it's not possible for such a monopoly to exist more than 20 years?
Then there are the sports franchise monopolies. Is anyone seriously challenging the NHL in profiessional hockey, the NFL in professional football, or MLB in professional baseball? No, and for most of the last century, the courts have recognized that the baseball monopoly is exempt from anti-trust laws.
So that's 4 strikes against your argument that no monopoly has ever existed for more than 20 years - those 4 certainly have, and still exist today.:-)
It doesn't work that way in real life - both inertia and the ability to outlast newcomers (and resume dumping with more state-funded backing) mean that either you impose tariffs or you permanently cede the industry.
Look at the electronics industry - no need to dump, because now there's simply too much of a concentration of manufacturing in China.
Subsidizing demand led to subsidized production. In other words, one market interference (subsidized demand for solar) leads to its counterpoint, government tariff and taxation of the same product."
That's how it's supposed to work. Market distortions by dumping (selling below the cost of production) are done to injure competitors and "buy" market share. Once all the competitors are dead, do you really believe that the "last man standing" isn't going to charge monopoly prices?
Also, less competition means less pressure to innovate. Innovation could include such things as greater efficiencies and / or lower production costs. So imposing anti-dumping tarrifs lets competitors stay alive long enough to generate the profits necessary to do the R&D to take their product to the next generation, as well as giving potential investors a reason to invest in new technologies and processes.
A new study of Canadian university students suggests Facebook is a magnet for narcissists and people with low self-esteem.
Participants who were deemed narcissistic, and others shown to have low self-esteem, spent more time on the massively popular social-networking website, the York University research found.
Researcher Soraya Mehdizadeh also found that these people use Facebook as a means of self-promotion.
Just get the email addresses of the people you really want to stay in contact with, then disable your account.
Please re-read the link you referred to - it backs up my statements 100%. It makes it quite clear that only representatives can actually introduce (or draft) a bill or law, even if the idea originates as a proposal from someone else.
"proposed drafts of bills" are not actual drafts - that is the exclusive purview of members of the legislature. The draft bill is that which is drawn up, signed by the member and put up for reading, motions, debated, reconciled with the senate proposals, blah blah blah, voted on, and if passed and signed, goes from being a draft to law. So facebook cannot "draft a law" - "draw up a law"... only a proposal, as per your link.
The problem is that the summary said that facebook was going to "draft new laws".
They cannot. You or I or anyone else can draft a proposal, but the drafting of laws is specifically reserved to the legislature, same as voting on them is. A draft bill is one that has been signed and submitted by a member of the house. Can you or I do that?
That said, the summary was really bad. Like I pointed out, nowhere in the actual announcement do any of the words "draft", "new", or "law" appear. Maybe slashdot does this sort of "non-editing" to promote "how many angels can dance on the head of a pin" debates to generate more page views?
Now that would be a story that would get so many comments it would break the system!
The first is to create fake accounts. It's trivially easy since all you need is an email address. However, these are very easily spotted by Facebook since they generally all only have one or two friends. If Facebook thinks these accounts are fraudulent, you'll often need to provide a unique phone number to verify that it is real.
[user comment] yes, it's too easy to create multiple facebook accounts. my sis made like 10 of them.
Anthony Permal Says:
January 27th, 2011 at 2:42 pm
Nice stats, however I wonder alot about that figure claim of 500 million âactiveâ(TM) users. I know at least 5 or 6 people who have multiple facebook accounts for various purposes including personal accounts, professional accounts and the like. I feel the stat should be changed to say 500 million active âprofilesâ(TM) instead. Its very misleading.
Manage multiple Facebook and Twitter accounts in one place
Whether you're a freelance social media manager or just someone with lots of online IDs, it can be a struggle to keep up with multiple Facebook and Twitter streams. Conversocial makes it much simpler.
@aep528 the other thing to consider in all of this is are they both reporting actual users or just active accounts. I know multiple people that have multiple FB accounts that they log in to regularly. 1 person with 4 accounts does not equal 4 users in my opinion but I don't know if either network acknowledges the difference in their reporting.
and
Michael Alan Goff 14th Oct
I was wondering how it might have been me. XD
He is counting signups vs usage, but even signups vs signups doesn't tell the whole picture. There are people, and I this to be a fact, that make multiple Facebook accounts.
Some of them are for fictional characters they write.
and
inux for me 14th Oct
Everyone I know that is on Facebook and play the games on it, have 2 or more accounts. Many of these games allow player to transfer resources to other players, so they use multiple accounts to accumulate resources to transfer them to their main account. This makes the Facebook numbers extremely inflated compared to actual users.
If Google+ adds games, then the same thing will happen there too.
With Facedekkyou have all the following features available at your fingertips
Simultaneously update statuses for multiple Facebook accounts
There's plenty more like that. I know people who manage multiple fake accounts just so that they can either spam, or to make it look like their SEO activities are working "look you have these many new friends" - it's the same as buying facebook fans in bulk - they're mostly fake accounts.
Slashdot Mirror
The thing is that nobody actually behaves based on what happens on facebook. Nobody buys a product because a bunch of people "like" it. Heck, most people can't even remember any of the last 100 posts they read (try it - interrupt someone who's surfing facebook, and ask them to recall what they were reading. Their brain is in "zoned-out mode" - for the most part nothing they read really registers).
We're in a "social media bubble", one which will collapse when advertisers realize that they can get better returns by spending their "social media budget" on booze and returning the empties for a refund.
Geez, it's not even a question of right or wrong - just distinguishing between slang and proper use in context. And it's not that important in the great scheme of things (which I think I was trying to point out). Like I said, the original post was for laughs (along with making a passing point about corporate regulatory capture - you know, using humour to make a point?), and I think most people took it that way.
But some wanted to get all pedantic, so I pointed out that the original article said nothing whatsoever about passing (or drafting) new laws - none of the words "drafting", "new", or "law" were in the actual article, and that if people really wanted to be so picky, their notion of "drafting laws", while it's common usage, is wrong in this one context.
It's like the freetards who insist on calling it "GNU/Linux", when they don't do the same in any other area of life. They don't call it a Mazda/Ford when Mazda makes the engine, or a GeneralElectric/Boeing, or a Sealtest/Cappuccino, and if they really wanted to be more accurate, they should refer to distros as Apple/GNU/Linux, because most distros use CUPS, which is owned by Apple. Or FreeBSD/Adobe/AppleGNU/IBM/AT&T/Linux ... or they can just do like everyone else, and just call it Linux.
Just like they could have either taken the original post in the spirit it was obviously meant, or alternatively, actually read the article and realized that the summary was a troll. Like so many slashdot articles that are binspam or linkbait or just downright lies (like the article that claimed tetris in 140 bytes, when if you actually counted the bytes, it was closer to 1k).
Anyway, like I said, the original post was just an attempt to draw attention to Facebooks' attempts at regulatory capture (same as their attempts to illegally claim over-broad rights to the terms "Book", etc). Too many people think that just because some site has a ToS, that it's legally binding, or somehow establishes a precedent, when in fact no ToS can over-ride local laws or public policy. It's like people who believe that EULAs are the governing contract, interpreted w/o reference to local laws that prohibit portions of them (YMMV depending on jurisdiction) or that they cannot return boxed software because a sign in the store says they can't "because of copyright law" - also not true, because I've forced them to take back crappy retail software that doesn't do what it says it does, and gotten a complete refund despite both the sign and the receipt saying otherwise.
Just saying ... :-)
This sort of behaviour leads to some funny results. One of my friends, as part of a study, was asked to contact - by phone - a bunch of people picked at random from a person's friends list for a marketing project. These were all people the person had said they knew because "I don't just friend anybody..." Not one of them knew the guy.
Facebook == lame.
So really, who cares? Facebook users are narcissists, insecure, asocial, or bogus "marketing accounts".
Another: The Open Source Initiative: $40,334.00 a year revenue. This is some kind of a joke, right?
If this is the top 18, don't bother with the bottom 999,982. It's not worth the electrons.
Apple makes 10x as much per day as the all the "Top 18" combined do in a year.
Heck, even Angry Birds makes more than twice as much as all of them combined.
Also, you're simply wrong - the government defines a monopoly as having more than 80% to 90% market share - Windows does have a monopoly. Once you have that much market control, you can extract monopoly profits. The existence of a tick on a flea like ecomstation is irrelevant hand-waving, and doesn't change the fact that the dominant vendor is in control of the market, and getting those monopoly profits.
I've seen it happen too many times. While I *am* posting this from firefox on linux, I also log out regularly because firefox is unstable, and it does corrupt other parts of the system. It's not "just a Windows problem," unfortunately, and their "rapid release cycle" only aggravates the problem.
Perhaps a better example would be the way people used to call themselves Microsoft Certified Software Engineers - totally illegal for Microsoft to certify them as such in various jurisdictions, from Texas to Quebec, because the title "Engineer" is reserved solely for engineers who are licensed by the professional body of the state.
I got fed up with this illegal practice, and emailed the governing body that since Microsoft could do it, I would too - that I was going to charge $100 to certify anyone who wanted it as a software engineer. Sure enough, they showed up at my door the next day threatening all sorts of legal action. I told them that I was on their side, but that if they didn't go after Microsoft, I would go ahead and they could haul me into court, and then have to explain to a judge how come Microsoft could break the law with impunity for years and I couldn't.
Sure enough, they had no choice - Microsoft was forced to withdraw the designation here. So terms are important when it comes to specific fields - in this case, Facebook certainly cannot "draft a law", just a proposal. It's a fine point, but it's a valid one.
All that being said, I only made my original post to be tongue-in-cheek funny, not to get into a drawn-out discussion of the finer points of terms - maybe slashdot needs to implement emoticons? Or at least a "set this background to OMGPoniesPink so nobody takes this post too seriously" option ;-p
And while we're at it, could we also have an option to distinguish slashvertisement "stories" and binspam? I try to kill them off in the firehose when I see them, but so many people obviously just go by the story title, and don't go to the site and see that it's mostly link-bait copied from somewhere else and plastered with ads and should properly be labeled "notthebest" (along with an option to submit the original link source).
One thing I've noticed is that people are cut-and-pasting earlier submissions, in the hope that people voting in the firehose won't notice the earlier submission. Talk about karma whoring ... :-( Oh well, enjoy the rest of the weekend. TTYL
You also has still failed to provide a single audited number, because you can't. Facebook could provide this number, but they don't because they know that the majority of their accounts are either fake or inactive. Their silence speaks volumes.
Don't forget - they could end this immediately by introducing strong account verification. They won't, because it would destroy the perceived value of their business.
Now it's interesting that you insist on dismissing every link that pointed to people with multiple facebook accounts as "mere anecdotal evidence", when it shows that people can and do have multiple accounts, specifically for things like game "pharming" and "marketing". Why? Is it that important to you personally to discredit anyone who points out the truth - that facebook is lying? Shill much?
So what? People who use the term "GNU/Linux" also come across a pedants. 6 of one, half a dozen of the other ... it's like the people who go on and on about "M$" and "Micro$oft" - it was cute in the beginning, but now it's seen as just lame and childish and bitter.
The application-and-drivers gap will always be there. There's no financial incentive to fix it, not for an operating system that, after 20 years, you can't even give away to the vast majority of people. Sure, I use it (posting from Fedora 16) but I'm a very small minority - when one distro breaks too much, I can always switch to another. Most users would just throw up their hands and say "this is crap" and either go back to Windows or on to Apple.
I can't blame them - Linux simply isn't all that good for anything but infrastructure. It's too forked, with everyone scratching their own itch, and nobody fixing the real problems that keep it from desktop adoption. Linux simply will never be ready for the mainstream, not without a pretty barrier (such as android) between it and the user - and even android now sucks because of the same fragmentation problem, but this time with the handset manufacturers.
It's too bad, but we had our shot when Vista bombed, and we lost. Now there's nothing shabby about being #1 in supercomputing, and #1 in web serving, and #1 in other fields, so why even stress about the desktop numbers? Linux is below 1% (anyone who dual-boots should only be counted as a half-user), and it will never rise above that, so what? You don't see Linus worrying about it one bit. If he's not worried, why should you or I be? Enjoy the rest of the weekend :-)
It's all a scam. So, why not produce some proof - audited numbers - to show that this isn't the case? Because you can't - all social media numbers are bogus - Facebook, Twitter, Google+ - you can buy as many followers as you can afford.
The hollow emptiness in social media numbers - most accounts are fake or empty
He and his assistant discovered that only 30% published anything on G+ and only 6% were "outright spammers." But the largest group he classed as,
Mr Kelly pointed to a study by two journalists at Popular Mechanics that only 25% of their Twitter followers were real, and 49% were fake or spam.
And this is a widespread problem:
The rise in fake users is directly related to corporate marketing campaigns that aim for large numbers of followers, 'likes,' and to show high levels of online engagement.
This has given rise to a growing services sector where it's easy to buy "friends" and "followers," by the thousands, and 'likes" by the tens of thousands, for a low fee. This can jumpstart a marketing campaign if it makes it onto a top trending list. Buying such services will also help contractors meet performance goals set by clients and trigger payments. It can be a lucrative arbitrage.
The result however, is considerable inflation in the numbers of users of all the major social networks and platforms.
Social media is a scam, same as SEO. Get over it. Facebook has less than 250 million active users, and they are a really low-quality demographic - people who have nothing better to do than bolster their low self-esteem by accumulating "friends" on facebook, and spammers.
If that's not padding the numbers, what is?
Also, all you have to do is search for "buy facebook fans". When you can buy 10,000 fans for $100 or less, it's because they're bots. How hard is it to figure out, mkay?
Now, why don't you provide some proof that facebook's user numbers are audited? Because you can't - they're bogus and facebook knows it.
The c library is replaceable, same as the tires on your car are replaceable with a different make, and we don't call it a Firestone/Ford, and when you change the tires, a Bridgestone/Ford. Or if the engine is made by Mazda, a Mazda/Ford.
Wrong - I provided links to people who admit to running multiple accounts - and I used to work at a place that ran multiple accounts as well, for "marketing purposes." So shove it, fat boy.
Try again. Neither one of them has even 1/100 of 1% of desktop market sales (sales, as opposed to downloads - but even if we included the free downloads, either of them will have a hard time breaking that 1/10 of 1% mark). So, a few thousand sales in a market where Microsoft sells hundreds of millions really de minimus. Also, selling a support contract is not the same - Microsoft is quite happy (and profitable) selling just a bare OS, no support.
BTW - it's not GNU/Linux, any more than your car is called a Michelin/Ford - but if you want to go that route, feel free to call it Apple/BSD/GNU/Linux - there's Apple-owned stuff in the typical linux distro - essential stuff like cups. ;-)
1. Apple's resurgence was due to the iPod, a market that Microsoft didn't have any hardware that could compete with. Microsoft continues to be the only vendor to sell stand-alone desktop operating systems that are not tied to hardware. The "Microsoft browser monopoly" never existed (Netscape had a near-monopoly at first, remember?).
2. KMart never had a retail monopoly. Until it merged with Sears, the two were always competitors in the down-market retail sector, and sears was the leader for decades.
3. "The DVD/Bluray Consortium Monopoly" is total BS - that's like arguing "The Hard Drive/SSD Consortium Monopoly" or "The Car and Truck Monopoly". If you want to make such a comparison, I'll do the same with the "7 laptop manufacturers in Taiwan with factories in China" who actually DO have a world-wide monopoly. But does any one of them have a monopoly? No - they compete like crazy.
4. You could "go on and on", and maybe eventually you'll find some valid examples, but these were not them.
Easy-peasy: Monopoly of more than 20 years: IBM Mainframes - well over 90% of the market - anything over 80% is considered a de facto monopoly for anti-trust purposes.
So please explain how IBM continues to not just monopolize the mainframe, but grow it over more than half a century, if it's not possible for such a monopoly to exist more than 20 years?
Then there are the sports franchise monopolies. Is anyone seriously challenging the NHL in profiessional hockey, the NFL in professional football, or MLB in professional baseball? No, and for most of the last century, the courts have recognized that the baseball monopoly is exempt from anti-trust laws.
So that's 4 strikes against your argument that no monopoly has ever existed for more than 20 years - those 4 certainly have, and still exist today. :-)
Look at the electronics industry - no need to dump, because now there's simply too much of a concentration of manufacturing in China.
I guess that's what you get for sleeping during the daytime and working at night.
The user agreement doesn't trump local law. Facebook can go do a Faceplant in a pile of FaceCrap.
Why don't facebook users walk away? Because they are too insecure to:
Just get the email addresses of the people you really want to stay in contact with, then disable your account.
"proposed drafts of bills" are not actual drafts - that is the exclusive purview of members of the legislature. The draft bill is that which is drawn up, signed by the member and put up for reading, motions, debated, reconciled with the senate proposals, blah blah blah, voted on, and if passed and signed, goes from being a draft to law. So facebook cannot "draft a law" - "draw up a law" ... only a proposal, as per your link.
They cannot. You or I or anyone else can draft a proposal, but the drafting of laws is specifically reserved to the legislature, same as voting on them is. A draft bill is one that has been signed and submitted by a member of the house. Can you or I do that?
That said, the summary was really bad. Like I pointed out, nowhere in the actual announcement do any of the words "draft", "new", or "law" appear. Maybe slashdot does this sort of "non-editing" to promote "how many angels can dance on the head of a pin" debates to generate more page views?
Now that would be a story that would get so many comments it would break the system!
http://www.quora.com/Do-most-Farmville-users-have-multiple-accounts-to-be-able-to-be-able-to-do-tasks-you-need-to-do-with-a-friend
http://www.digitalbuzzblog.com/facebook-statistics-stats-facts-2011/
http://howto.cnet.com/8301-11310_39-57399449-285/manage-multiple-facebook-and-twitter-accounts-in-one-place/
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/facebook/facebook-is-not-20-times-the-size-of-google-its-even-bigger/4654
and
and
http://www.facedekk.com/
There's plenty more like that. I know people who manage multiple fake accounts just so that they can either spam, or to make it look like their SEO activities are working "look you have these many new friends" - it's the same as buying facebook fans in bulk - they're mostly fake accounts.