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“One billion people used Facebook in a single day”

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

#161

Post by glandium »

shmerl wrote: post #65
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #33

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…

It's a social failure, not a technical one. There are decentralized social networks, but people are stuck in FB with various excuses despite constantly complaining about privacy and other problems.

There are decentralized social networks, but how many of them could actually scale to the size of FB?

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

#162

Post by aristus »

jfoutz wrote: post #152
aristus wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back when I worked there, I "audited" the systems that count Facebook's active users. I needed to analyze code efficiency and feature growth over long periods of time, and so needed very accurate user counts in order to subtract user growth. Without going into details / trade secrets: there is more than one system, they can cross-check each other, and if anything it's conservative. You have to perform legit, non-driv…

That sounds pretty amazing. Can you offer any insight about users with multiple accounts? Back in the farmville days, people with 10 accounts seemed pretty common. An account just for tinder, or a professional account seems to be a common tactic as well. I'm curious if multiple accounts are common, or just a few percent of users take it to that level.

Tricky question. I was working on perf, so I could avoid the tricky philosophical / data science questions like that. FB did say in 2012 that they believe 8.7% of accounts were dupes or fakes. I can't say what the number is now, nor comment on how that relates to DAU accounting, but that's a good rough upper bound. Further, deponent sayeth not.

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

#163

Post by onedev »

jgalt212 wrote: post #155
civilian wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He doesn't. Here's some data. June 2015 averaged 968mil daily active users. From their quarterly report: http://investor.fb.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=924562 And quarterly reports aren't something you add marketing lies to.

ok, well, let's attack this problem from another angle using the data you cite. 968 mil customers, $4.04 Billion in revenue. That makes $4.18 in revenue per customer for the quarter. You'd be hard pressed to name another going concern even 1/10th of facebook's size with such low rev/customer numbers. So what's wrong? They are either miscounting customers, or they are horrendously bad at achieving any non-trivial reve…

I can promise you that in developed countries, revenue generated per user is much much higher. For example in the United States in 2014 it was ~$9 (and growing).

When undeveloped countries start developing faster, revenue per user per year will rise sharply in those regions as well, thus increasing Facebook's overall revenue significantly. That's why both Google and Facebook are focusing heavily on getting internet to 3rd world countries.

This is a long term game and they are winning.

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

#164

Post by __Joker »

ajkjk wrote: post #130

I hate stuff like this: "A more open and connected world is a better world. It brings stronger relationships with those you love, a stronger economy with more opportunities, and a stronger society that reflects all of our values. Thank you for being part of our community and for everything you've done to help us reach this milestone. I’m looking forward to seeing what we accomplish together." It reeks of dishonesty.…

Can't agree more. FB is selective honesty at best and public gloating at worst. The people I know are awesomely different if I simply go through the FB profile. While It might not be specific to FB and generally applicable to any online community. Obviously FB would like to take credit for connectivity and all. On a side note, While I also get the same feeling dealing with American culture when compared to Asian cultures.

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

#165

Post by dump100 »

KingMob wrote: post #113
cheald wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To paraphrase Han Solo, "yeah, but who's gonna pay for it, kid? You?"

Once upon a time, all Internet protocols were distributed, passed-along by ISPs peering bandwidth (email, IRC, Usenet). The users paid their ISPs, and the ISPs had agreements to share and not bill each other (sort of). This broke down, because most people monetizing an idea don't want others to host it outside their control. And now, even the peering agreement is breaking down, as Verizon tries to shakedown both side…

Diaspora has resources on higher side, Mark Zuckerberg had little cash from friends, Diaspora raised it from Kickstarter.

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

#166

Post by dump100 »

sd8f9iu wrote: post #52
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #33

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.

Will have to also consider, FB login is most popular 3rd party login, add to that facebook comments and other widgets on 3rd party sites. FB going down will have a substantial impact

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

#167

Post by rabbyte »

austenallred wrote: post #106
rabbyte wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since we're all totally guessing here, I feel like I should point out that we're talking about FB scale here. Negligible minority for FB would be many products entire user count.

Right. 10 million fake accounts is still a negligible amount.

Well, it's only negligible within context. Nothing is just automatically negligible at scale but within the context of active users for a single day, I agree, it's negligible.

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

#168

Post by yellowapple »

0942v8653 wrote: post #144
gpcz wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're underestimating the scale of this problem. According to http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2013/01/18/faceb... , people upload 350 million new photos per day, and they have 240 billion photos total. If we use 1 MB per photo as an average, you'd need about 334 terabytes to store a day of Facebook's pictures. You'd need 228882 terabytes to store the whole thing. Assuming Wikipedia's estimate of…

If you were bent on getting it all, even at 1 Gbps: (228882 TB to Gb) sec to years = 58 yr 3 w 1 day 18 h 40 min 58 years is going to take a long time

You can split that across multiple attackers, though. A botnet of 58 machines would be able to do it in about a year by that math. Once you cross into the thousands, a full dump like this is suddenly feasible.

That's why this is more a storage problem than a bandwidth problem in practice. That's a lot of hard drives. While it might be possible to build up a botnet of a few hundred thousand slave machines to download and store it all, the task is by no means trivial.

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

#169

Post by yellowapple »

peterwwillis wrote: post #158
gpcz wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Getting in might be possible, but then the attacker would have to covertly exfiltrate and store all of Facebook's content to do a dump. Does J. Random Attacker have enough storage to do this?

No no no. That's not the hack. The real hack will be using Facebook to infect people with malware. Which will probably be staggeringly easy once they get inside. It will be impossible to remove, it will hijack legitimate connections to non-FB accounts with injection attacks, it will expose all the credentials of all the users of all the services of these 1 billion people. The compromise of sites that rely on Facebook…

> And it's a virtual certainty that it will happen one day.

Hell, it's probably already happening. Facebook's a big company. Not inconceivable to think that there might be at least one underpaid, disgruntled, obese, bespectacled mole in their ranks, quietly subverting security measures and siphoning data until he gets his $1.5 million pay day and heads off to retire in Costa Rica (or attempt to before getting eaten by Dilophosaurus while trying to escape Facebook's HQ...).

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

#170

Post by rconti »

alecdbrooks wrote: post #149
brayton wrote: post #128

What are the next closest products in terms of single day user count?

Taken together, Coca-Cola's beverages might come close: >Today, products of The Coca-Cola Company are consumed at the rate of more than 1.8 billion drinks per day. [0] However, it's hard to say how that translates to unique people, since it's not uncommon for people to drink more than one soda a day. Not to mention the fact that the product lineup is very diverse: you could have orange juice for breakfast (Minute Mai…

And the size of a drink. A packaged item? Or 8oz?
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