[Total_Meltdown]

I honestly don't know anyone who actually likes Facebook. My group of friends and I continue to use it because there just isn't any better way for us to stay in touch at scale on a day-to-day basis, and nobody really cares enough to put up with the fragmentation that moving to a different network would cause. So it's in this weird middle ground of being too important to give up outright, but not important enough to bother actually fixing.

[niggler]

"I honestly don't know anyone who actually likes Facebook."

That's the thing I've never understood. On the one hand, on the nightly news Facebook is discussed as if everyone has an account (and that privacy changes actually matter to most viewers). On the other hand, none of my close friends use facebook.

[jonursenbach]

Stop living in a vacuum. One billion people have a Facebook account. It's possible that your close friends are not in that group, but the average person on Earth does, in fact, use Facebook.

[niggler]

"One billion people have a Facebook account." " the average person on Earth does, in fact, use Facebook."

The population of the earth exceeds 7B (http://www.census.gov/population/popclockworld.html) so in fact the average person on Earth does not use facebook

*unless you live in a vacuum where 1/7 counts as half

[thewizard25]

You have to factor in the number of people who have regular internet access though.

[niggler]

I wouldn't be surprised if more than half of americans ages 18-24 have a facebook account but the original quote was:

"Stop living in a vacuum ... the average person on Earth does, in fact, use Facebook."

No qualifications made for internet access

[taligent]

Who cares about the qualification. Your entire premise is just ridiculous.

You can't just take your single data point (my close friends aren't on Facebook) and then extrapolate it (most people aren't on Facebook).

[nuclear_eclipse]

Pedantic correction: One billion people use their Facebook account every month. There are many more than that whose account is inactive, abandoned, or not used on a monthly basis.

[niggler]

pedantic correction: One billion Facebook accounts are accessed every month. No third party established that each account corresponds to a unique person.

[nuclear_eclipse]

Considering the vast amount of complaints towards Facebook regarding privacy concerns, do you really think it would be in the best interest of those users to allow third parties access to all of their data to "verify" that?

[niggler]

1B accounts != 1B sensate human beings. thats my point, and many people seem to conflate the two

[nsmartt]

>none of my close friends use facebook

I'd say you're lucky. Most of my friends use Facebook. I refuse, so I'm out of touch with most of them. I figure if we aren't willing to keep in touch in other ways, our friendship isn't holding up very well anyway.

[niggler]

I like (the seemingly lost practice of) calling and meeting friends face-to-face