Matthias' Digital Traces

Impressive Facebook statistics

2009-11-30T00:03:00.002+01:00

I recently saw an interesting presentation from Amir Michael reasoning about Facebook's datacenter technology. He motivated his presentation with a number of impressive usage statistics:

Facebook users spend ≥ 8B minutes/day collectively on Facebook (that's more than 15k years/day); that makes Facebook the No. 1 site in US in terms "time spent per day"
5B API calls to Facebook API per day sent by approx. 15k client applications
More than 300M active users
Generating 25T of logs per day
Over 2B photos are uploaded per month; currently there are 20B photos in total for which Facebook stores 4 different resolutions
Serving 1.2M photos per second (this was mentioned in the abstract of the talk)

Those seem to be the official numbers that I've seen also mentioned at Facebook's Engineering Roadshows. Dare Obasanjo's notes from the Engineering Roadshow in Seattle highlight a couple of other interesting numbers:

The average number of friends per registered Facebook user is 130
The page with the most fans is Barak Obama's page with 6.8M fans
The fastest growing demographic is user aged 35 and older
There are more than 350k Facebook applications
The impressive image storage and serving statistics mentioned above make Facebook the No. 1 photo site on the web

I'm also on Facebook, but given that I have less than 130 Facebook friends and I'm also visiting the site at most once a week, I'm probably far from being an average Facebook user.

New homepage

2009-01-25T15:25:00.000+01:00

In the last 5 years, my homepage didn’t change at all. I recently decided to give up developing my site in HTML directly and imported all my content into an application called RapidWeaver. I hope I’ll have the time to update some of the pages more regularly in future. The previous two blog posts were written in 2007 when I was trying out RapidWeaver, iWeb and similar applications.

Apple preparing for WWDC

2007-06-10T08:49:00.000+02:00

It looks like Apple is ready for the Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco starting Monday, June 11. When I passed Moscone Center today it was impossible to miss the huge Apple logos on all sides of Moscone West.

Google Developers Day

2007-05-31T21:11:00.000+02:00

Today is Google Developers Day! This is a world-wide event with more than 6000 participants. I am attending the event in Hamburg. It takes place in a hotel, so there's not too much space. I am giving a talk about the Google Base API. There's a YouTube channel linking to all sessions.