One Billion Friends

I'm thinking of a number between one and one billion. Can you guess what it is? Trick question: it was one billion, which isn't technically between one and one billion, but that doesn't matter now because I just wanted to get you thinking about numbers. So think about it. One billion. Or try it this way: ONE BILLION. Maybe like this: 1*10^9. Even 1,000,000,001 - 1 is a viable if annoying mathematical option. There's a lot of ways to say it, but they all mean the same thing, i.e. a really big number that fits in between one million and one trillion on the chart of "Numbers We Know Yet Can't Really Comprehend and Especially Can't Count To Without Using a Computer." While perhaps most famous for being Dr. Evil's ransom request, on Thursday that number took on an entirely new, completely un-Mike-Myers-related connotation: as of September 14th, it is also the number of active monthly users on Facebook.
Or, to quote my very loud initial reaction upon reading this statistic, holy balls, that's a lot of people. On a related note, I'd like to take this opportunity to apologize to all the people in the library who jumped when I shouted "Holy balls." In hindsight, I probably could have whispered it quietly to myself, but at the time I was so taken aback by the number I couldn't contain my emotions. Next time I will be sure to hold back my exclamations.
All references to religious testicles aside, it's an undeniably remarkable number. This is the first time that a social network has reached this size; regardless of whether or not you use Facebook you can still note the magnitude of this achievement, a testament to the growing and ever-pervasive role the internet plays in our lives. Depending on your view of this role, it's either a mark of increased global life- improvement or just another sign of Skynet's imminent arrival. But let's not get tangled up in the specifics of the impending technocratic u(dys)topia. Instead, let's try to destroy this accomplishment.
Is there any way in which these numbers could be faulty, miscalculated, or plain old wrong? Short of just fabricating the numbers completely, which would be market suicide for Facebook, no. As for miscalculations, I'm sure Facebook employs only the highest-quality counting machines.
Could the numbers simply be off? Now, it's super probable that this number is skewed by duplicate and fake accounts, as well as those of parents seeking and failing to keep an eye on their children's "facebooks." However, that still leaves a very large percentage of legitimate users who don't have names like "ThreeChainz Deschanel, Jr." or "AndyBoo's-Mom-Alicia Hernandez". Even if I overestimated the number of so-called "fakers" at 20%, there's still a left-over 800 million actual people.  It might not possess the magic of a round one billion, but 800 million isn't by any means something to sneeze at. That's the kind of numbers that Twitter only dreams about, that Google+ would kill for, that Linkedin would...well, Linkedin doesn't exactly spur to action easily. It's the Hector Salamanca of social networks.

800 million dings...what could they mean?

Let me put it this way: should Mark Zuckerberg ever manage to corral all the active Facebook users into one giant mass of land, something I would not deem impossible for him, and turn it into a country (known as Zuckerbergbourg), it would have the third largest population in the world, right behind India and China. It would comprise one-seventh of the world's people. In other words, it would be a major and influential world power. To be fair, half its population would be functionally illiterate and only know how to express their emotions through misquoted song lyrics and passive-aggressive duck-faced selfies, meaning the sole possible type of government would be an autocracy which the intelligent half would grudgingly rise up against, but for its three days, maximum, of real countryhood, Most Friendly Leader Mark could claim the distinction of having more than twice as many subjects/citizens as the United States. This is completely hypothetical, obviously. Zuckerberg is horrible at sharing (ironically) with other sites; how willing do you think he would be to share entire people with other countries? Not very willing.
Thankfully we will never have to live in a world where technology companies can create their own countries, because that would suck like an iPhone's battery life. Besides, this current world, where companies possess mounds of data on everyone who's ever used the internet, is arguably enough pessimistic fodder for Luddites and those who hate Al Gore.
Speaking of data, the numbers bigger and slightly more important than that of how many people use Facebook are those of what people use it for: 265 billion uploaded pictures since 2005, 1.13 trillion Likes since 2009, 17 billion "location-tagged posts" since 2010, and 500 bajillion attractive women's profiles stalked since probably as soon as profiles were an option. While those numbers may seem impressive, if viewed over a period of time you can see that the rate of activity increase on Facebook is decreasing. More people are sharing less, and less frequently. Facebook is running into an inevitable wall (ha) as users become bored with the options available to them to interact and with the site as a whole. Which is worrisome for Marky Mark & Co.
But why? Why wouldn't Zuck just be happy to have his billion-plus loyal subjects, sit back in his hoodie, and watch the moolah roll in? Because that's not how Facebook works. The size of the user base is nice, but it's merely a means to the end. Its entire business model is based on personalizing ads to each user's individual tastes and whatnot, and the only way to properly gauge what kind of ads ring best with each user is to collect information about their interests, their likes, and their Likes. So, if a user simply exists on Facebook, without much interaction or activity on the Data Matrix Knowledge Minority Report Graph, or whatever its official name is, he or she is giving the database nothing to work with, no way beyond guessing to tell what kind of ads would be most likely clicked. And while guessing may work for hedge fund managers, it's not a valid business model for a social network. Though, if you think about it, there's no real tried-and-true model for a social network, simply because it's such a novel concept, but regardless, if there were, it wouldn't contain guesswork. Facebook may lose out simply because it forgot to factor in the most human of emotions: boredom.
Facebook is obviously going to continue to grow. It will hit two billion, maybe three if the wind is right and the young generations stay as stupid as we've been. It will create more celebratory videos of unrelated things somehow linked together, with even more mixed metaphors. Mark Zuckerberg, while perhaps never the ruler of his own country, will paradoxically remain very rich yet also wear the same sweatshirt everyday. But unless Facebook is able to innovate some brand-new way to convince people to start sharing their cereal preferences and dookie-schedules again in full force, they're going to end up out of data, out of money, and then follow the downward spiral of Friendster and Myspace before them: a fall from popularity, a crash, then a revitalizing transformation into a hip, new-yet-retro, site for some kind of aspiring artists. Wait. That can't be right.

I mean, I guess Justin Timberlake could be considered "aspiring"...

Ben Hornung eagerly awaits the day Terminator comes true. Follow him hypocritically bad-mouthing social networks on Twitter.