“One billion people used Facebook in a single day”

Re:“One billion people used Facebook in a single day” by lifeisstillgood on Thursday August 27, 2015 @05:12PM (#10132130)

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-aligned country, I would be wondering how to build that replacement - this is like television in the 1950s, but everyone around the world is watching NBC.

But boy does 100bn dollars look cheap now.

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Re:“One billion people used Facebook in a single day” by sd8f9iu on Thursday August 27, 2015 @05:27PM (#10132226)

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.

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Re:“One billion people used Facebook in a single day” by hk__2 on Thursday August 27, 2015 @06:32PM (#10132583)

To add to your point, studies show that people use FB to keep contact with their existing friends; not to meet new ones. This means in most cases FB is not the only communication channel one has with their friends.

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Re:“One billion people used Facebook in a single day” by dump100 on Thursday August 27, 2015 @10:31PM (#10133442)

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

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Re:“One billion people used Facebook in a single day” by sd8f9iu on Friday August 28, 2015 @11:20AM (#10135905)

That's true, I forgot about that. Thankfully, most of the sites I use that have FB login are just for entertainment, not communication or anything serious. But that's true.

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Re:“One billion people used Facebook in a single day” by rokhayakebe on Thursday August 27, 2015 @05:54PM (#10132392)

There is a more likely possibility that there are some people whose entire idea of the internet was/is/will continue to be FB. Someone will be born, raised, and die thinking FB is the whole internet. Someone else WeChat.

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Re:“One billion people used Facebook in a single day” by shmerl on Thursday August 27, 2015 @05:41PM (#10132303)

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.

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Re:“One billion people used Facebook in a single day” by glandium on Thursday August 27, 2015 @09:23PM (#10133202)

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

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Re:“One billion people used Facebook in a single day” by shmerl on Friday August 28, 2015 @01:35PM (#10136786)

Good question, since I don't think it was tested ;) With full decentralization they should be able to scale, but theory should be tested by practice.

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