[Foundation-l] It Is not Us

[Fred Bauder]

Facebook, and Twitter, big with Black folk, gives people something they
can relate to. Wikipedia is as dry as reading, or writing, an
encyclopedia.

In a sense they ate our lunch, but millions of Facebook-like user pages
can hardly be justified as a basis for charitable donations.

Fred

> What lovely abuse of statistics!
>
> By showing them indexed to the same scale, it makes it impossible to
> draw the conclusion they try and draw. You need to know the *absolute*
> increase in facebook usage and the *absolute* increase or decline in
> total internet usage. If their numbers are correct, then facebook is
> growing at the expense of the rest of the internet, but without the
> absolute numbers you can't tell if it's doing so to a significant
> extent.
>
> You really need to look at the growth in total internet usage pre- and
> post-facebook as well. I expect the existence of facebook has caused a
> noticeable increase in total internet usage (compared to pre-existing
> trend). It is creating new internet minutes, not stealing them from
> other sites.
>
> You should probably also look at Facebook's direct competitors. For
> example, usage of MySpace has declined enormously - a lot of
> Facebook's growth may have come from that decline. The article
> suggests Facebook is hurting the rest of the internet, but if it's
> really only hurting other social networking sites, then there is
> nothing to worry about.
>
> The most important data for us to look at is here:
> http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesPageViewsMonthlyAllProjects.htm.
> While that does show a year-on-year decline, that actually because of
> a spike a year ago (I don't know why). If you smooth things out a bit,
> we are seeing growth (albeit fairly low growth). What the rest of the
> internet is doing isn't really important.
>
>
>
> On 25 June 2011 15:03, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at fairpoint.net> wrote:
>> The web itself is passé
>>
>> http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-facebook-vs-the-rest-of-the-web-2011-6
>>
>> Actually, we missed the boat, but that ship sailed long ago.
>>
>> Fred
>>
>>
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>