Someone is bashing the facebook numbers and just discovered Linkedin?! Lol.

BUT I think the numbers tend to be correct. A lot of my non tech friends here in germany are now on facebook. I only know 3 guys that are not on it. And they are not on it because of privacy concerns. And I even saw parents organizing their school board meetings through it.

Very scary thought to see that Facebook got so huge, but you can't say the numbers are wrong. At least not as wrong as the poster tries to make them.

Right, but it costs nothing to join FaceBook.

Measuring their success by counting membership numbers is the same as measuring the success of a shampoo brand by counting the free samples they've given away.

Perhaps, but you don't turn around and give the shampoo producer intimate details of your life. Instead, you probably forget that you have the sample and end up throwing it out 6 months later.

They're different businesses, I'm not sure that you're comparing apples to apples.

We don't know how many people sign up because someone said it was cool or invited them and then forget that they have a Facebook account.

It serves Facebook to publicize a giant number to make them appear unbeatable, but the numbers that count aren't about number of users - they are about usage.

I think it's a reasonable analogy.

There is also huge "fatigue" in my social network. Posting frequency drops with time, except for those who have put up status rotators.

> except for those who have put up status rotators.

Wow, I didn't even know that these existed. Do people just have a set of statuses that they randomly cycle between?

Anecdotal evidence.

I live in a fairly low tech central/eastern European country, but I know a lot of people that use Facebook and IM, most of my colleagues use Linkedin, but only some use Twitter. If an event isn't on Facebook it could be invisible.

SMS is common for a decade now.

It depends on a lot of things, exactly why this blog post has little sense.

I also live in Minneapolis, and I see a very different thing in the social media realm than the original author. It seems to me that when someone gets a smartphone, the first thing they do is install the facebook app and then start using facebook every moment they get a chance (even on blackberries from work).

The only time I see people really using location based services is when they're looking for directions (Garmin already made the inroads there). Personally, I use a lot of location based services, but I've also been working in the field for awhile.

I'm in the author's demographic. I'm not on Facebook or Twitter, and none of my friends are either, for the most part.

According to Men's Health, Minneapolis is the 4th most socially networked city in the US: http://www.menshealth.com/best-life/social-networking-cities...

Maybe the author is old. Every kid in Minneapolis is on Facebook and sends 8000 text messages per month.

I talk to my grandmother via facebook.

The plural of anecdote is not "data."

Correct, however did you read the article?

Here's a tl;dr: none of my friends use Facebook.

fairly regularly.

I'm guessing you could make the same argument with a lot of technology, fashion, etc. I think the only edge Minneapolis is known to be on is that of food-on-a-stick.

That's a pretty elitist view of the Midwest.

The first popular web browser (Mosaic) came from the Midwest, you know.

The exception proves the rule? Note, by the way, that I said Minneapolis. I admit that the entirety of the Midwest houses some great schools and centers of social development, but I don't think that's representative of the norm.

I would genuinely like to know if my impression of Minneapolis is incorrect. In what way is its technology adoption on par with that of San Francisco or New York? Is it at the leading edge of anything?

Minneapolis actually has better bandwidth than NYC, and the iPhone actually works there, too.