I appreciate the jest of your comment, but I think it's a bit disingenuous to dismiss the 1 billion number because a small fraction of users may have multiple accounts.

Because let's be fair: Facebook is one of the very few companies that announces active users, with a fairly clear definition of what they mean by "active". At this point they're likely to have more accounts (including unused ones) than there are people alive so it would be silly now, but they've virtually always used the active metric.

And the fact that they still promote MAUs as a growth metric makes me believe the number even less.

They could hit 1.5 billion tomorrow if a group of hackers got ambitious. The number is practically meaningless. Unique individual numbers are far lower.

Your declarative statements unencumbered by any research are fascinating.

What would be a better metric in your mind than MAU? Contrast facebooks MAU to google pluses "has a google account" metric.

The facebook prospectus also has daily active users of which at last count there were 483mil.

>"Your declarative statements unencumbered by any research are fascinating"

Worked for a social gaming company, investigated this exact problem ("How many of our DAUs are multiple accounts?"). For our game, which had mechanics that encouraged player-to-player commerce, the number of these fake accounts was huge: around 40% on DAUs of ~150k. It was clear to me and my co-workers that this was a big issue, everywhere. But everyone in the space benefits from saying "1 BILLION USERS!" when you are selling ad reach. Except for those actually buying ads. Oops.

Moved on to different things, shorted ZNGA in April after the OMGPOP acquisition, having been privy to this scheme. Have made a decent return, covering at ~$5, but missed the last two big drops. I'm not particularly concerned what you choose to believe, because my view has worked out pretty well for me.

Wouldn't it be great if there were an MAU attack against Facebook where a group built a system to create billions of active accounts to the point where the MAU number was greater than the computing population of earth?

You're asking how long it would take for a hacking group to expand FB to 12 billion accounts?

Not 12 billion - the number just needs to greater than the number of computer/internet users on earth.

If it's close (8 billion), people will likely ignore it as either a rounding/math/counting error, or as "those people who have a 2nd account for their dog".

There are 7 billion people on earth, there are 2.3 billion with Internet access as of 2011 - FB claims that 40-ish% of Internet users are monthly actives, which is clearly BS, so you don't need to get it anywhere near 8 billion. You simply need to get it near or above actual Internet access capable people.

So more like 4 billion.

I'm also a few... and about 10,000 of twitters MAUs.

I'm curious what your 10000 twitter accounts are doing.

It was a small project. Generates about ~$600/month in passive profit.

Haha, would love to hear more about his.

Linking to facebook accounts.

I made a few active users to interact with one another to progress in FB games.

Why?

Well, I work in the field so I feel like I should be playing the games my company makes. The social requirements are super annoying so I make fake accounts to spam so that I can progress.

me/us too

My favorite quote today!

I'm a few too, and also inactive in reality.