Daily Archives:January 9th, 2010

Facing the Facebook facts

In the early days of Facebook, I found it rather annoying – there were just too many invitations from people which would have involved installing applications in my account. So I focused on the more streamlined Twitter, and many of my friends seem to have done the same.

But I’m definitely in the minority. Facebook publishes detailed statistics about their users, presumably because they are rightly proud of the numbers. 350M active users, of whom, on any given day, 50% log in, and 10% update their status at least once.

Twitter doesn’t publish any stats, but even the most optimistic estimates suggest they have less than a tenth of these numbers. For all the recent attention, it does seem as if they have a long way to go to be anything like as influential as Facebook, and such graphs as I’ve been able to find suggest that usage has declined over the last six months.

Anyone know of any reliable stats?

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Cross-posting

For some time, when I’ve posted something here, a notification has been put on my Twitter account, and since my Tweets also go to Facebook, it’s been visible there too.

I realised recently that the final stage had stopped working: while my manual tweets get copied to Facebook, the remotely-posted updates weren’t doing it any more – some change in the FB Twitter app, I guess. So I’m now investigating Wordbooker, a WordPress plugin that will post directly from here to FB, and also claims to be able to synchronise some comments between the two systems – let’s see if it works!

© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser