That is weird. As these things go, I'm reasonably high profile. I'm also connected to some vertices of extremely high degree. I get zero fake friend requests per week.
Twitter? Flooded with fake connections. Facebook? I can't remember the last one I saw.
It can depend a bit on geography. Facebook.jp has a suspiciously high number of attractive young ladies in Ogaki (as in, literally, more than the number of 18 to 22 year old young ladies in Ogaki) who send friend requests for, I assume, the purpose of developing marks for scams.
I'm also one degree of separation from two countries in Southeast Asia and this causes me to get a lot of friend requests of dubious provenance.
EDIT2: Last year Facebook said 4.8% of their MAU was duplicate, misclassified, or spam accounts. That's 51+ million today assuming the percentage has remained constant.
That's not how Facebook Pages work - a Page isn't an account you log into, it's something your main Facebook account can have admin rights to (and a Page can have multiple administrators). I have admin rights on a few Facebook Pages but I only count as a single active user, and I don't have to log out of my Gregor account to administer them.
Historically, some brands did create full Facebook accounts, but Facebook now discourages that and as far as I know most brands are using Pages now. For a while Zuck's dog, Beast, was a notable exception (he had a Facebook account long after that was discouraged) but it looks like he's just got a Page now.
I don't recall Beast ever having anything but a Page - in fact, I remember that Zuck mentioning in a Q&A that he was using Beast to get a better feeling about what it's like to run a Page.
> The number of DAUs, mobile DAUs, MAUs, and mobile MAUs do not include Instagram users unless they would otherwise qualify as such users, respectively, based on their other activities on Facebook.
It doesn't necessarily mean that. 2/7ths of the world's population logging in to FB once every two months would result in the same MAU number, even with zero people logging on _every_ month.
Moreover, these MAU numbers probably include people like me, who receive a push notification of a message sent to a group, click it once to view the message, and quit the app after 2 seconds.
The part "I almost feel shitty for having deactivated my account." probably came off as irrelevant and poorly worded to some users. I'm actually not sure how to connect personal emotion and not being part of a popular option.
I was joking and not trying to be obnoxious, but I suppose it came off that way. I was more commenting on the impressive gravitational pull of something that has a good chunk of the world's population using it. To a very non-trivial percentage of the globe Facebook is a vital utility and communications tool. That's impressive, considering the turn-over rate of other popular social networks that are or nearly are defunct.
The fact that their revenue is growing, and not shrinking, is astonishing given that a couple years ago people were counting down the days until Facebook dropped off the leaderboard.
These numbers are seriously mind boggling a DAU count of 829 million is close to 1/8th of the worlds population. Even more impressive when you consider the fact that only about 3 billion even have internet access.
~1/3 of the people on the planet with internet access are logging into Facebook every. single. day.
I'm pretty sure they count every single minor interaction as a log-in. You receive a notification on your phone and then swipe it away? That's an interaction.
829 million DAU translates to roughly 10k users logging in a second, I can't even imagine how many requests that translates to. Can someone explain how their infrastructure works so they can manage this? I literally cannot fathom a system to handle this that isn't multiple millions of servers.
What's the trend around external vs. eventual consistency at Facebook? I ask this comparing eventual consistency in TOA and Google's shift towards external consistency in Spanner.
Just like a high level overview of there setup, I'd assume they would do more sophisticated things than just throwing more hardware at the problem(millions of servers vs thousands).
As of June last year they had hundreds of thousands of machines. As for the architecture it is basically a PHP app in front of a massive fleet of Memcached instances and a few databases here and there specifically for different apps e.g. photos, messages etc.
That is a bit simplistic and is missing a bunch of things.
First the numerous C++ and Java backend services that do most of the heavy lifting like producing the feed, doing searches (of various types, both from what people type in, and internal ones), sending and receiving messages, spam and fake account detection, &c. The PHP portion acts as a front-end to these services.
TAO is the graph caching system that has largely replaced memcache at Facebook.
Just on the traffic side, there is the global traffic management system (for dynamic and for static content), different types of load balancers, CDN-specific caching software, image and video transcoding/encoding, &c.
And that's just the stuff involved in the production path - there are all sorts of behind-the-scenes things that do async work of various types - either as soon as possible (video encoding, updating) or on a daily or whatever cadence to update infrequently-changing things.
Facebook is the only web site on which I can simultaneously (or at least near-simultaneously) look at my college roommate's pictures from Athens while writing a letter to my Grandma and videochatting my long-distance girlfriend.
Facebook, for me, has a monopoly on bidirectional communication.
Perhaps someone could explain to me in simple terms why FB's stock has been surging for the past week (and is currently $75 in after-hours). Did people have an "inkling" about the financials?
The sarcastic side of me would like to say that facebooks success is due to the recent increase in embedded video links in the news feeds. The videos are annoying. But FBs reach is increasingly impressive. Surely that's the driver.
Would anyone care to chime in on why Facebook's income tax rate is so high?
"GAAP income tax expense for the second quarter of 2014 was $595 million, representing a 43% effective tax rate. Excluding share-based compensation and related payroll tax expenses, the non-GAAP effective tax rate would have been approximately 36%."
60 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 131 ms ] threadMany people have multiple devices (phones/tablets) and people have multiple accounts as well.
Still an impressive number nonetheless, even if it was 1/10th of the world's population...
Crazier, IMO, is the DAU. 829 million log in EVERY DAY.
(I get friended by 3 clearly fake facebook accounts a week at this point ...)
Twitter? Flooded with fake connections. Facebook? I can't remember the last one I saw.
I'm also one degree of separation from two countries in Southeast Asia and this causes me to get a lot of friend requests of dubious provenance.
EDIT: I don't see how the above statement beckons downvotes. Yes. It was an assumption, but not absurd one at that. Here's one such article that talks about fake accounts -- http://www.cnn.com/2012/08/02/tech/social-media/facebook-fak...
EDIT2: Last year Facebook said 4.8% of their MAU was duplicate, misclassified, or spam accounts. That's 51+ million today assuming the percentage has remained constant.
Historically, some brands did create full Facebook accounts, but Facebook now discourages that and as far as I know most brands are using Pages now. For a while Zuck's dog, Beast, was a notable exception (he had a Facebook account long after that was discouraged) but it looks like he's just got a Page now.
(I used to work at Facebook.)
What they've achieved is no doubt impressive but there is still a lot to figure out in the model to extract as much as possible from all those users.
GOOG sales: $16b for the latest quarter; FB sales: $2.9b; 5.5 fold difference
GOOG net income: $3.39b; FB net income: $791m; 3.84 fold difference
I don't think the numbers include instagram either, it hasn't been monetized and therefore irrelevant to financials.
Edit: Confirmed, doesn't include instagram users. In the earnings slides http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/AMDA-NJ5DZ/3349527922...
> The number of DAUs, mobile DAUs, MAUs, and mobile MAUs do not include Instagram users unless they would otherwise qualify as such users, respectively, based on their other activities on Facebook.
Moreover, these MAU numbers probably include people like me, who receive a push notification of a message sent to a group, click it once to view the message, and quit the app after 2 seconds.
It's still a large number, though!
Is there a generally agreed unit of time spent per instance of log in activity, to qualify as a MAU?
Or just the very act of stumbling into the FB app (somehow), through the myriad ways possible out there, still constitute a MAU?
I understand that this does not count (?) API calls (justifiably).
All these years in, I just want to assure myself that we are still not in the era of sketchy metrics and non-standard parameters.
For example this Nielsen graphic is from 2012 and shows time spent, on social networking broadly, in HH:MM
http://www.mediabistro.com/alltwitter/files/2012/12/nielsen-...
Note: Asked in the other duplicate post, as well.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8077054
829 million DAU - I almost feel shitty for having deactivated my account.
The fact that their revenue is growing, and not shrinking, is astonishing given that a couple years ago people were counting down the days until Facebook dropped off the leaderboard.
~1/3 of the people on the planet with internet access are logging into Facebook every. single. day.
First the numerous C++ and Java backend services that do most of the heavy lifting like producing the feed, doing searches (of various types, both from what people type in, and internal ones), sending and receiving messages, spam and fake account detection, &c. The PHP portion acts as a front-end to these services.
TAO is the graph caching system that has largely replaced memcache at Facebook.
Just on the traffic side, there is the global traffic management system (for dynamic and for static content), different types of load balancers, CDN-specific caching software, image and video transcoding/encoding, &c.
And that's just the stuff involved in the production path - there are all sorts of behind-the-scenes things that do async work of various types - either as soon as possible (video encoding, updating) or on a daily or whatever cadence to update infrequently-changing things.
Facebook, for me, has a monopoly on bidirectional communication.
Wow, that seems really high. Are other companies monetizing mobile ads like this?
"GAAP income tax expense for the second quarter of 2014 was $595 million, representing a 43% effective tax rate. Excluding share-based compensation and related payroll tax expenses, the non-GAAP effective tax rate would have been approximately 36%."
:)