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Billion, with a B. An email to every single one of its users—so actually a little over a billion at this point. In other words, one seventh of the entire Earth’s population is getting hit with one message.
The blast—the largest email dispatch Facebook has ever sent out in its history, and certainly one of the biggest non-spam deliveries in email history—isn’t even of anything particularly thrilling. In short, Facebook used to allow users to vote on certain policy changes if enough people chimed in—now they’re going to phase that out, which doesn’t matter because nobody really used this system anyway.
So as not to cause some sort of explosion, Facebook told us it’ll be sending the messages out in waves But still! One billion emails. One billion people, hypothetically all reading the exact same thing. How many times has that happened in human history? I would venture not that many times! Of course, if you add in all the people who will die between now and then, spam filters, people who just delete everything, and those mutants with 95,000 unread messages in their inbox, the number will be lower than 1,000,000,000.
But I repeat: a billion damn emails. If you listen closely, you can hear them rumbling right now.
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I reckon they’ve just been trying to think up an excuse from the moment they were sure they could hit one billion individuals at once, just so they seemed less geeky from the excitement they got from the fact they were contacting 1/7 of the planet in one go.
It’s pretty damn impressive though. Nerdgasmic.
I have 3 accounts, so thats a lie then
And quite a few SMM companies have 10,000 accounts also, doing a quick bit of maths I work out the the active number of real facebook accounts is 76
and not counting Mark Zuckerbergs account that’s still 75 too many for my liking!
Damn Zuck.
I dislike how you cannot add him to your “Block” list. It always says “the system is busy” but when you then try to block a different Zuckerberg it works.
I’m guessing this is US billion i.e. one thousand million, rather than the UK billion (one million million). Still impressive though.
The “UK Billion” is rarely used these days. Anytime you hear billion on the TV it’ll be a thousand million. There are 7 thousand million people on the planet. Incredible
It’s not only the UK, I know Russia generally considers a million million to be a billion.
Personally I think it was millionaires in the USA who reached a thousand million and decided they wanted to be different from the ‘ordinary’ millionaires who only had 100 million or so
It’s also more elegant mathematically and pretty sure I was always told to use the short scale when at university.
A thousand, a million, a billion (1 thousand million) = 10^3, 10^6, 10^9
It does make more sense, to be fair.
The UK officially changed from using the long scale (a million millions) to the short scale (a thousand millions) to match the US in 1974.
well you learn something every day
Gizmodo needs more Doctor Evil!