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“One billion people used Facebook in a single day”

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51–60 of 197 posts

Re: “One billion people used Facebook in a single day”

#52

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-alig…

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.

Re: “One billion people used Facebook in a single day”

#53
post #48
post #30

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.

Why do you have 20 accounts?

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.

Re: “One billion people used Facebook in a single day”

#54
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would it even be possible to exfiltrate all that data? It's hard to imagine even storing all that they're generating in a single day. What's the most an attacker could likely get? Usernames & passwords for all users? Complete profile/album/comment data on a few tens of millions?

They keep a lot of data in cold storage as well, so not sure how easy it would be able to get everything. Probably just whatever data they think will be likely accessed soon and is in relatively ephemeral storage.

Interesting attack vector would be something that watching the staging area from cold storage and sent that data out.

Re: “One billion people used Facebook in a single day”

#55
post #9

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

In all fairness, this is the resources and development access of a single organization though...

I'm consistently amazed at how well the likes of FB, Google/Youtube, AWS and Netflix actually work by those organizations. Yes there is the occasional down time where things are partially down... just the same that they manage to handle the sheer volume of traffic is truly impressive. Most businesses don't really need more than what a large co-located server offers in compute and storage...

To create a system that services requests from hundreds of millions of simultaneous users throughout the world is genuinely impressive.

Of course it does have its' cracks... The mobile browser interface is more and more gimped as time passes, and the comments for posts that don't have hundreds of replies is equally borked (don't see all replies, or your own half the time). "Eventually Consistent" has it's price... but the reward is handling hundreds of millions of users at one time.

Re: “One billion people used Facebook in a single day”

#56
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess would be 1 billion unique accounts logged in today, via one means or another. Absolutely mind blowing.

I wonder how many of those accounts are fake / sockpuppet / astroturf / paid likes

Again, totally guessing here, but I would guess a negligible minority

Re: “One billion people used Facebook in a single day”

#57

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

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"?

Re: “One billion people used Facebook in a single day”

#59
post #34

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.

Seems like our brain think in log.

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

Re: “One billion people used Facebook in a single day”

#60
post #34

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.

Seems like our brain think in log.

Our number system is in log: value(number) ~ 10^length(number)
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