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Poll: How many Facebook accounts do you have?

55 points by Aloisius ↗ HN
There appears to be plenty of anecdotes going around implying that most people have more than one Facebook account, but Facebook's own statistics seem to indicate that most of its users are active.

As more and more companies rely on Facebook for identity and single sign on, understanding the true reach of Facebook and how many users you're losing by only supporting Facebook connect, becomes important.

How many Facebook accounts do you have?

62 comments

[ 6.8 ms ] story [ 42.1 ms ] thread
gsivil
I have created more than 10 to help a friend on Farmville :) plus my personal one.
ddphone
1 and it's fake. I'm not sure what you'll get out of this poll. Most people will create an account simply because some site requires it and then completely forget about it.
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jeffreymcmanus
If you're developing Facebook apps or using Facebook authentication, you pretty much have to have two or more Facebook accounts. The problem is that having more than one account is against Facebook's terms of service, and they don't provide a developer sandbox.
bemmu
You can create test accounts through the API. I actually have a terminal script where I just write "fox" and it opens up a new Firefox profile with a new Facebook test user in it.
woodall
Care posting or giving a bit more insight?
bemmu
You can open Firefox on Mac OS X with a certain profile with a command line like:

open -n /Applications/Firefox.app --args -P some_profile -no-remote http://localhost:9011/test_user

The URL is on my dev server, it creates a Facebook test user and then redirects to it. First you get an access token from graph.facebook.com/oauth/access_token, then you use https://graph.facebook.com/APP_ID/accounts/test-users to create an account using the token you just got.

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mndaniels
Shouldn't everyone's answer be 1 since more than that is in violation of FB's TOS :)
a3_nm
It is again FB's TOS to have 0 accounts now? Wow. :-P
weinzierl
Not only that, it's easy for them to enforce that. When I recently tried to create an account (from Germany) Facebook required me to enter a mobile phone number. It wouldn't let me create an account without. So you effectively you need a mobile phone number for every account.
kennu
Just use prepaid SIM cards to verify as many accounts you like.
anigbrowl
One that I only log into about once a month when I want to look at someone else's page from a search result. I feel a bit guilty about not keeping in contact with my friends more often, but Facebook just looks like such a dreadful time sink.
jwhite
I've got roughly the same use patterns as you, and if it weren't for the one or two regular events that I attend that are organized on Facebook, I'd probably delete my account. And yes, it is a dreadful time sink. That's why after the first flush I scaled back to around once a month.
hc5
1 real, 1 fake for testing, 2 kids under 13 = 4
lotharbot
I have one account for myself.

I also manage one for my baby boy, so that I can keep baby pictures all tagged and organized in one place. I don't consider this to be my account, I consider it his.

This points out an ambiguity in voting. If you register an account for your kids, should you count it?

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jarin
I have one, and I use groups to keep business and personal posts separated. I also have a "limited profile" group for people I only sort-of know (surprised more people don't do this).
getsat
Should this total include ones we've bought in bulk?
Joakal
"As more and more companies rely on Facebook for identity and single sign on, understanding the true reach of Facebook and how many users you're losing by only supporting Facebook connect, becomes important."

It sounds like poor understanding of a core marketing aspect there: Knowing the demographics. Unless you are trying to rely on Facebook Connect with the HN audience though?

redduck666
1 personal (rarely used), 1 fake for random staff on internets and whole bunch i created along the way on projects/gigs/jobs
pstack
Does it count as an account if the only reason I created it is to keep others from creating one in my name? Mine just says "I don't use FB. Email me, instead."

If you can't be bothered to reach me outside of FB, then you don't care enough about either the subject matter or me.

Mantis
I think it should, yeah. Because it is probably filled with sh*t about you that your friends have posted. Like pictures in which you where tagged.
ehsanu1
I have 200+ accounts, from when I was first learning how to program and was automating some tedious mutlplayer strategies in a text-based facebook MMO game. Was a fun way to learn!

The game was called Warbook, and I believe the creator is on HN (hi TJ!), and doing some YC gaming company.

xuki
Wow I almost forgot about this game, I just checked and it doesn't seem to work anymore. I also wrote a bot to play 50+ accounts for me, mainly to generate gold and sell them. I made about 2k USD via paypal, and my programming was so much better after that.
ehsanu1
Nice. I had $5k worth of gold for when it was selling for $10/billion, but then the price crashed since I was slow and supply had gone up while I had stopped playing. Oh well.
xuki
Yeah most of my gold was sold @ $2/billion. Another way to make money was to help people train their accounts to level 50, this took like 20-30 minutes for 2 accounts, easy money.
37prime
I used to have one, then I deleted it.
levifig
Why the heck would ANYONE have multiple accounts? Doesn't that even violate the TOS? :S
tilt
I gave this argument differents thoughts, not only having different accounts violates Facebook's TOS but Zuckerberg states it is "immoral" to have more than one account so people should be ashamed of it. I can understand his position, he has to enforce the fact that every active user on Facebook is a real user.

Now, let's rule out developers that until lately were forced into this behaviour, there's plenty of people out there using multiple accounts. Plenty of people using multiple accounts on daily basis. For example people running businesses/marketing with their account instead of page and much more importantly you know who's using more than one account? Casual gamers, those who play games on daily basis. Every Zynga game (just to point out the most successful ones) is a spam factory forcing users to spam in order to advance in their games, users are aware of this and start their "gaming" accounts. If you didn't think about this yet, just try and check how many people descend from the "Games" family (and that's only for english speaking countries) these days, impressive growth. Now check the "Cityville", the "Farm*" family and so on.

And there's plenty of other categories.

Once I read that Madrid had two times as many accounts on Facebook as the real city population. Now you could point out we don't know how many of this users are counted as active, of course Facebook will never point out the number and will always defend its strenght, but that's something people should think about.

metronome
businesses that advertise on facebook are pretty much forced into using more than one account as well
sjs
I have a personal one I rarely use and one for logging in to just look at something behind the sign in linked from HN or reddit.

I might go there to message someone I fell out of contact with but I deactivate my account instead of logging out. So I have 2 but don't really use either of them.

usadream
why do you need more than 1?
biafra
I have one real, and one fake. The fake one is to find out what applications do before they can do it to my friends.
city41
Do you find Facebook applications have enough value to warrant this? I just don't use them. But maybe I'm missing out.
pavel_lishin
Day to day, I'm not even sure that Facebook has enough value, much less the applications.
michaelcampbell
This is brilliant. I have a fake one for no particular reason, and also with no friends, but I think I will start using it for this reason alone.
asjo
Here is a plot of the results: http://koldfront.dk/misc/hn/facebook/data.png

(Currently updated every hour; I will fade out updating as time passes.)

TeMPOraL
Great idea :).

Labels on horizontal axis need fixing though (eg. 6-10, not 6).

asjo
Overzealous cropping to avoid the long text after the 0; fixed - thanks!
formulaic
Wow. That means that FB doesn't have 600 million users but 20-30% less. It always bothered me that they pretend that every account equals a unique user. Good IPO luck.
spacemanaki
I think you mean "That could mean that FB..."

There's less than a thousand respondents in this HN poll, and HN isn't likely a representative sample of FB users.

brockf
This is a sample largely consisting of web developers, and people who know that you can have more than one account. That conclusion doesn't follow, in my opinion.
fredoliveira
HN is a sampling of about 0.01% the size of Facebook. There's absolutely no way you can make the argument that they have only 20% the users they claim.
swah
How many HN accounts do you have?
lelele
You should start a poll with this.