Facebook, 1/6 of the worlds population

According to an article from Techcrunch Facebook says they will serve 1 billion “Like’s” over the course of the first 24 hours that this new feature is available.  Facebook is allowing an website to integrate with Facebook so that users can see what their friends “liked” on a site like ESPN, CNN, Pandora, or IMDB.

For example, when I listen to Pandora now in my broswer every time a new song comes on I get a message about which one of my friends “likes” this artist.  This is currently pulling from the “Interests” section of their profiles.  It’s somewhat interesting to see what my friends musical tastes are – especially at a time when unsecured loans I’m thinking about music and am engaged in listening to a song.

I think this concept is great, and I’ll be excited to see more sites implement the tools that Facebook is providing.  What I have a problem with though is that Facebook says it will serve 1 Billion “Like’s” in the first 24 hours.  That’s a pretty huge number, and I just don’t see how you can convincingly claim that anything would happen a billion times on the first day it’s available.  You just can’t expect users to completely understand it right away and start using it the way you expect.

Even with huge partners like ESPN, CNN, Yelp, etc it would be difficult to get to a billion in one day.

Take a look at Compete.com’s data for some of the big partners that Facebook is brining on at launch.  These are all massive sites, but they still only reach a combined 75 million visitors per month.  That’s really only 2-3 million per day.  If only half the visitors used any kind of new “Like” button – that would mean each user would need to do so 1,000 times…in 1 day.

Looking at the math from another way – Facebook has about 400 million users.  Let’s say 200 million of them are actually on Facebook at some point today.  Every single one of those users would need to “Like” 5 different things…in one day.

I’d love to see the actual statistics on how this goes for Facebook.  I’m sure it will bad credit loans eventually be a huge development for the web I think the 1 Billion “Like’s” in one day is a little bit unrealistic for now.

Although I haven’t seen the Facebook integration on ESPN yet, I did my part by hitting the like button on a few new songs in Pandora.  So far that’s the only site involved that I use regularly and would actually contribute anything meaningful.