[LINK] Facebook 'likes' and adverts' value doubted

[Antony Barry]

On 16/07/2012, at 4:22 AM, stephen at melbpc.org.au wrote:

> Earlier this year Facebook revealed that about 5-6% of its 901 million 
> users might be fake - representing up to 54 million profiles.

I have 139 Facebook friends. 

At least two have set up pages for their pets. As a result one of my friends is a dog.

Two of my friends have two accounts. One because she had password trouble and started a new account, the other because she keeps one account which is work related and the other not. So there are two duplicates.

Three of my friends are children, a granddaughter and two cousins.

Three of my friends are institutions and not people.

One of my friends is a historical figure, dead some centuries and I do not know who maintains the page. Another died and her page lives on as a memory in the cloud.

These are the oddities I know about. There may be more.

So there are 12 friends I know that should not be thought of as people Facebook provides services to but in addition possibly a third are people who have not posted for many months mostly not at all after the first few weeks on membership. It may well be that the latter exist because I know an unusually high number of people who were curious to see what the hype was about Facebook and saw that it was a superficial medium.

Power laws apply as they do in any social activity (even link which I documented in a paper years ago). Well over half the postings I get come from 5 people.

I suspect at least half of Facebook's membership can be discounted.

Tony