Showing posts with label myspace. Show all posts
Facebook announced this morning that it will welcome its 200 millionth user today. That's a whole lot of people. Just three months ago the company announced it was starting the year out with 150 million users. That kind of growth could make a person's brain hurt. People want to connect with each other and Facebook is clearly a very compelling way to do that these days.
Just how hot is it though? For context, we looked up some other activities and offer below a list of things that are less popular these days than being a registered user at Facebook. Bowling, for example, appears to be headed the way of MySpace - there are now twice as many Facebook users as there are people who play ten pin bowling around the world.
At 200 million users, Facebook is:
- Twice as big as the largest number of people who have ever watched a Superbowl game
- Twice as big as YouTube
- Twice as big as Skype
- Bigger than the number of people who own gaming consoles in their homes (190m)
- Bigger than the population of all but 4 countries in the world. (Just passed Brazil, next in line is Indonesia and then the US.)
- Twice as big as eBay.
- Four times as big as the number of people in the US who run on treadmills.
- It's twice as big as the number of malnourished people in India. Another way to look at that is to imagine that half of the people on Facebook were malnourished and living in one place.
Now imagine if all the brainpower spent on building stupid Facebook apps was instead spent on helping all the malnourished people in India and around the world. Imagine, though, if the 100 million people who like to bowl gave that up in favor of working for world peace.
These numbers can't be directly compared with any real meaning, but we think it's interesting for context. It's still cooler to live in France than it is to have a Facebook account, even if it is only 30% as popular.
Biology is an extremely messy thing. It makes you do things you regret in the morning--and sometimes things you regret seconds after you've been arrested.
Yet according to psychologist Dr. Aric Sigman, biology may be a crucial reason why too much time on Facebook and MySpace might leave you at greater risk of deathly diseases like cancer and dementia.
Apparently, if you spend too many hours interacting (socially) alone, your immune system, your hormone levels--in short, the whole chemical box of your entrails--gets just a little messed up. And when the chemicals start to misconcoct, bad things can happen.
Dr. Sigman believes that society as a whole has experienced a significant reduction in face-to-face time over the last 20 years. Writing in Biologist, the journal of the Institute of Biology, he is very clear about the cuddle chemical.
Its technical name is oxytocin (not to be at all confused with OxyContin). And it's a fine hormone that, in your fellow man's physical presence, encourages you to hug him, your fellow woman or, indeed, your fellow rottweiler.
Dr. Sigman insists that cuddle chemical levels radically change (not for the better) when you're agreeing to send your life savings to Ludmila, the Deland, Fla., native you may have just met on MySpace.
"There does seem to be a difference between 'real presence' and the virtual variety," Dr. Sigman told the Daily Mail.
This is what happens when your cuddle chemicals desert you. (That's what I imagine, anyway)
(Credit: CC R Marin)I am not in a position to question Dr. Sigman. I am alone in a New York hotel room, praying that my Golden State Warriors can somehow force the Lakers' Phil Jackson to regrow his mustache live on TV. However, my evident chemical imbalance has allowed me to discover some more of Dr. Sigman's work.
In 2005, he appears to have penned a piece for the Daily Mail entitled "How TV is (quite literally) killing us." Reading it made my cuddle chemicals curdle, as the doctor declared that watching "even moderate amounts of television" may lead to "damaged brain cell development and function."
Dr. Sigman also points out that TV "is the only adult pastime from the ages of 20 to 60 positively linked to developing Alzheimer's disease." (Ah, that had slipped my mind.)
Oh, and it seems quite clear that it's also "a direct cause of obesity--a bigger factor even than eating junk food or taking too little exercise." (I will run all the way up Madison Ave., straight after the game.) And let's not forget that TV "may biologically trigger premature puberty." (Too late.)
I suddenly want to cuddle Dr. Sigman for a prolonged period of time. It may be the only way to prevent him from altering my chemicals (not for the better) any further.
Different tracking services show different numbers when it comes to measuring which social network is most popular, but at least one now places Facebook with a significant lead in the US. Compete has updated its data for January, and the service now shows Facebook seeing a full 10 million more visitors each month than MySpace.
With Facebook growing another 14.9% from December to January, the site now reaches 68.5 million people each month, versus 58.5 million for MySpace. Granted, Compete is the only service we track showing such a disparity, though the gap is narrowing on other tracking services as well. Nielsen Online’s year-end numbers put Facebook’s domestic traffic within 3 million of MySpace, while comScore still has MySpace with a significant but shrinking lead.
Meanwhile, Twitter’s growth continued to accelerate in January. The microblogging tool grew 34.7% from the previous month, and a whopping 812.7% year-over-year. It’s still tiny compared to the two leaders though, reaching a total of 5.9 million people in January. Of course, that doesn’t account for all of the people that access Twitter solely through a third-party app.
