[Grollicus]

"500.000 new Members last month!!1" (I just totally made that up)

I suspect its the same as facebooks "2 Billion Users" - its just good for PR to have huge numbers. If you look too closely you might even lose Members in a Month, and we all know "growth" is very important..

[Balgair]

You know, I could see ol' Zuck sitting there in his Herman-Miller Aeron chair looking at the internal numbers of FB 'users' and seeing the number be ~15 billion accounts that their in-house 'bot filters still think are 'real' people. He says to himself: 'You know, maybe I could tell the UN that there really are 15 billion people out there and they are all on FB. Ha, I mean, a lot of people really might believe me.' He looks out the window, sighs, and puts out an email via Thunderbird to the marketing team leads that says to keep the number at 2 billion.

[AlwaysRock]

Do you have a blog? Genuine question.

[Balgair]

Nah, it's best to keep the ranting low-key and not tied to me personally. If you see my comment karma, I say enough dumb stuff already ;)

[teej]

Facebook and I believe Twitter report Monthly Active Users. This isn't some smoke and mirrors number. Sure, bots may count in this number, but they aren't referencing total signups when they say "Users" like you imply.

[CharlesW]

> This isn't some smoke and mirrors number. Sure, bots may count in this number…

They do, which is why it's reasonable to consider it a smoke and mirrors number.