HN Explorer

1/500th of humanity's time is spent on Facebook

60 points by RoboTeddy ↗ HN
More than 350 million active users; Average user spends more than 55 minutes per day on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics)

(6.7 billion * 24 hours)/(350 million * 55 minutes) = 500

It's unclear how they're measuring time spent on the site, but most of Facebook's statistics seem to be honest (they only count active users, etc).

56 comments

[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 142 ms ] thread
SlyShy
Grudging upvote. One of the most depressing sights I see these days is lecture halls full of students on Facebook. I guess a lot of students don't care about red black trees or strongly connected components, despite ostensibly seeking a CS degree.
randy
For most people, there is a lot more than just a degree to seek out in college. I'm no big fan of Facebook whoring myself, but while it obviously doesn't replace stimulating conversation or actual time spent together with good friends, it does provide a lubricant for them. My guess is that when all is said and done, you'll value your social ties and personal development a lot more than your knowledge of red black trees.

P.S. I don't mean to suggest people blowing off their classes to use Facebook is the way to go, but I think that to suggest it can't have value is somewhat silly.

SlyShy
It certainly does have value, but considering how much people pay to go to college it seems wasteful not to take advantage of the classroom resources. Going to college is great for finding a co-founder, making friends, etc. Whether class time is well spent doing those things, however, is less clear.
unalone
It all depends on the class and the context of the college.

I Facebook in a few of my classes. Sometimes it's because we're going over something I learned when I was younger. (I know how to use Final Cut, for instance, even if I'm completely clueless about sound/lighting setups on a movie set, so despite one class's being productive there're interludes where I don't need to focus as much.

I have other classes, however, where a good part of the focus seems to be on socializing. My entire major is devoted to entrepreneurialism; a huge part of the major is meeting other people and getting ideas going. So classes often have a relaxed environment in which people are encouraged to talk to one another. Facebook's useful there, also. I personally find it much easier to judge people and their ideas online; in person everybody seems beautiful and brilliant.

A huge part of what you get when you pay for college is access to all those people. Classes are valuable on one level specifically because they put you in a defined context with a slew of other people. I'm a people person, but I hate randomly going up to people, and I don't like talking to people without there being a reason for us to talk. Classes connect me to people, which is just as valuable service as the things I learn.

I'll also add that in the group I'm working with right now to launch things, all the communication's handled entirely over Facebook. We tried Backpack and Skype and Google Wave, and none of them could handle the conversation as well as informally talking to one another on Facebook did.

alexgartrell
Alright, I get that it's cool to "lament the failings of the common man" or whatever you're doing here, but I'd like to point out that both Red Black trees and Strongly Connected Components are just SUPER trivial. In fact, most thing covered in CS classes are trivial. With the book and provided notes/slides, you should be able to do just fine.

Class time should be productive time. Work on something important instead of the low-bandwidth information exchange that is the lecture.

weaksauce
I have talked to some kids in college classes that just don't have the intellectual curiosity that most hackers have. They will simply not go out of their way to learn something new for the sake of learning something new. I started learning Erlang not because I want to find a job programming Erlang but because I would like to expand the way my mind thinks about programming. If all you have is a hammer....
blhack
One of the most depressing sights I see these days is lecture halls full of students on Facebook.

Ettercap, there's a plugin for that.

weaksauce
Ha. I wonder what the best MITM attack would be. Is rickrolling still in vouge? or should they be sent to a G.W.B./Sarah Palin fanclub page(assuming that most students on campus are liberal this would be an insult)?
blhack
Well...

I think the point would be to direct them at their school's library page or, at the very least, wikipedia.

(Not that I ever did this).

mechanical_fish
I'm sure that no more students care today than cared back in my day. Which is to say: At least half of them don't care.

But there's more to it than that. Lectures suck as a means of learning about red-black trees. Unless the lecturer is literally world-class, I can better spend my time by watching the world-class version of the lecture on iTunes U. Or by reading the best book on the subject -- books move faster than lectures, except when you need to slow down and think, in which case they obligingly slow down for you.

Of course, while lectures are a fairly low-efficiency way to learn many subjects, it is necessary to give them at least a little attention in order to learn about what will be on the specific test that the professor will give you at the end of the term. And, of course, some lecturers are world-class. If you find one, put Facebook away, for god's sake!

gaborcselle
"I can better spend my time by watching the world-class version of the lecture on iTunes U."

That's a really good insight.

There needs to be a site where I can go to to watch the best possible explanation for any concept. Something like a Wikipedia for videos.

SapphireSun
Isn't wikimedia trying to build wikiversity? The last time I went there it was piss poor compared to wikipedia articles, but it made an attempt to read like an introductory text.
unalone
Academic Earth? iTunes U?
SapphireSun
So very true. The summer after I graduated I started listening to Genetics lectures by an extremely entertaining lecturer at UC Berkley. I was far more engaged with iTunes than I was in most of my classes. The same went for books. Pity I learned these lessons too late to do independent study as much as possible.
c1sc0
care to share who that was?
SapphireSun
You can find it on iTunes. There are three professors who teach at various times that are all very competent, but Urnov's lectures especially captivated me. I wonder if he will discover one of his mysterious podcasters with a google search ;-)

Molecular and Cell Biology 140: General Genetics - Fall 2007 Audio

Fyodor Urnov, G. Garriga, R. Brem

Note: These people speak very fast.

[deleted]
(comment deleted)
jhancock
Google is getting so incredibly fast. As I'm reading this, your post is 16 minutes old. I copy/pasted your calculation into google search just to see how well the google calculator would interpret it. Your post here shows up as the first result. Now, I may expect it to show up first but within 16 minutes and assuming nothing else links to this content yet?
rms
Google indexes this site very fast. I think it probably happens within 5 minutes.

Let's give it a try. It's 10:26PM EST.

This is a very obscure phrase that no one else ever uses.

personamb
2 minutes later, it's there. This is a very obscure phrase that no one else ever uses. ... hackerne.ws/item?id=973578 - 1 minute ago
mlinsey
Going even further off-topic, the sheer speed of Google's updates is one reason why I have felt that the pain-point of "real-time search" is overrated.
tlrobinson
If you were able to sort the results by "last updated" then I might agree, but AFAIK you can't.

With Twitter Search you can easily see the most recent results first.

harpastum
You can sort by date in a google search. Click on "Show Options" just below the search field, and about 15 lines down in the left bar, "Sorted By Date."

I think it's a fairly recent feature, but it's there.

neilk
There's a difference between searching for a unique phrase (the document is the only exemplar, therefore it ranks #1) and searching for the best page on a breaking topic.

That said, it's not clear to me that humanity actually needs real-time search. Maybe there's some advertising value in winning the race to be #1 for "hudson plane crash" but is there really a business here?

blasdel
That the hackerne.ws domain is what gets indexed is so fucking ridiculous:

  1) Some cretin camped on a domain and didn't have the courtesy to do a 301
  2) PG is an asshole and ignores the Host header. HTTP/1.1 was a decade ago!
  3) Google is a jackass and prefers a low-pagerank domain.
     Maybe some asshat used Feedburner to proxy RSS via that domain?
rms
That domain is no longer the one indexed. It knows.
diego
There are at least tens of millions of web sites. This site ranks 3500 on Alexa and 12k on Compete. Google knows that and prioritizes its crawlers accordingly.

Maintaining a fresh index of the top 100k sites is where search engines get their best bang for the buck.

endtime
Doesn't Google use Pagerank for crawling policy/priority?
radu_floricica
Google offers a "push" mechanisms for sites. You'll have to google for the specifics, but if HN implements it then google knows when a page is updated and re-reads just that page.
writetoalok
I wonder if this site uses it though. I would guess, it probably does.
dasil003
Makes me wonder if Facebook will ever decide they've pursued engagement far enough and that they have an ethical obligation to actually deliver more value even if it comes at the expense of engagement.
SapphireSun
Unless they are implanting electrodes in your pleasure centers or are affecting the GDP in a large measurable way, I'm pretty sure ethics aren't really coming into play. After all, they are providing a useful service.
unalone
True that. They've simplified communication for their demographic immensely. I talk to people more on Facebook than I'd be able to in actual conversation, because it's such a nonlinear process.
chaosmachine
Who wants to do a calculation for TV?
winter_blue
On a conservative estimate 1/50th.

(6.7 billion * 24 hours)/(3 billion * 1 hour) = ~50

mbrubeck
According to Nielsen, the United States alone watches about 1.4 billion hours of television per day, so 3 billion worldwide is probably not too far off: http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/nielsen-news/americans-w...

In fact, with India and China together having about 4 times as many TV households as the US, I bet the total is significantly higher than 3 billion hours, probably more like 10 or 20 billion (1/16 to 1/8 of humanity's time). http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/11/business/yourmoney/11india... http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/search/article_display.j...

1/5 of human life in the US is spent watching television. Probably around 5-10% of human life worldwide. Now that's cognitive surplus. Obligatory Clay Shirky link: http://www.shirky.com/herecomeseverybody/2008/04/looking-for...

RevRal
I'm on the edge of whether or not this sounds like a ridiculous number.

It would take the equivalent of 500 human lives for 1 human life to be wasted on Facebook.

For some reason I'm just not feeling a response to this; though, I'm going to have to think about it some more.

gloob
By way of comparison:

About 60 000 American soldiers died in the Vietnam War, out of a total population of roughly 200 million Americans.

That works out to one American life lost for every 3333 (ish) Americans.

Even if we ignore the fact that Americans are almost certainly wildly overrepresented on Facebook relative to the rest of the world, the website is six times as destructive to the U.S.

Tongue firmly in cheek, incidentally.

johnrob
If you assume that people are sleeping 8 hours per night, that number becomes 1/333.
RoboTeddy
and if you furthermore only look at internet users (there are 1.7 billion of them), it goes to 1/84
kwamenum86
People who spend that much time on Facebook would likely "waste" their time in some other way if the site did not exist.

[Edit] But that makes the figure no less staggering.

SlyShy
Facebook is just the Solitaire of the younger generation. ;)
RevRal
You know, you have a good point.

In high school, I was pretty shocked when my mom sat down with me and my buddies to play Tetris. And she actually whooped on us.

What was going on became very clear to me when her only complaint was that the controls weren't on a keyboard; she could only have gotten that good by wasting her time playing the game at some old job or school.

It is also funny to note that she had no conception of the competitive aspect of the multilayer modernization of Tetris, even though she was flailing bricks at us the entire time.

pwnstigator
How is this measured? I'm sure I have a tab open for that long, but I don't spend more than 5-10 minutes per week actually using it.

1/500 of humanity's time spent with an open browser tab of Facebook doesn't seem nearly as impressive.

blasdel
Facebook tracks actual activity, not just the tab being open, and they expose this to your friends by default: Facebook IM!

  They know when you're sleeping
  They know when you're awake
  They know if you've been bad or good
  So be good for goodness sake!
storborg
Since Facebook has the ability to asynchronously measure the amount of time the page is open (rather than just the amount of time you're actively requesting new pages) I expect this number somewhat overestimates the amount of time that people are actually focusing on Facebook.

I leave email clients, twitter, etc open a lot. By the raw numbers, it could be said that I spend more than half of my waking life using an email client.

ronnier
Sometime ago I delete my facebook account. One of the primary reasons was the time wasted on it that could be better spent doing something productive. I was adding no value to my life by using it.
krallja
Did it work, or did you find something else to waste time on?
unalone
I deleted my Facebook account just a few weeks ago, along with my Google account. I don't like feeling dependence.

My Google account is still gone — turns out it wasn't giving me much value besides the email, and I hated my Gmail name so not much loss there. But I restored Facebook within 24 hours. I have too many people that I can't talk to in any other way. While I enjoyed the freedom, I enjoyed the friends much more.

So I restored my account, but deleted every friend I thought to be nonessential. I wound up with nine friends, each of whom I'm constantly in some state of conversation with. So I can't waste time as easily — I don't write notes as much, I'm rarely tagged in photos by them — but I'm still able to use it to talk.

That's what I love about Facebook's design. It's granular. You can choose to barely use it at all and it still gives you some value.

ronnier
I'd say it worked. Since then I've spent time daily studying and reading books in my field which is very rewarding.
baazil1
Uhh, where is the share button to Facebook?
winstonsmith
The average time spent per user is not the same as the time spent by the average user. The former is the mean time and is what is needed for the calculation (in place of 55 minutes); the latter is the median time.

On the other hand, the mean is at least half of the median, so at least 1/1000 of humanity's time is spent on Facebook (if the other assumptions are correct).