Hello & welcome to another edition of the GK Nugget.
Did
you know that from Jan to March 2017, Indians spent 2.5 hours a day on apps,
higher than the 2 hours they spent during the same period in 2016? And this is
more than the 1.5-2 hours spent by citizens of the US, UK, Germany and France.
And did you know that WhatsApp has 1.2 billion active users currently, making it
the most popular mobile app globally.
But today’s GK Nugget will bring you some lesser known
facts about another app/website that we spend a lot of our time on – WhatsApp’s
mother company – Facebook.
(Facebook bought over WhatsApp for $19 billion in Feb
2014)
On 18th May 2012, Facebook was listed on
NASDAQ (US stock exchange, which is the 2nd largest in the world). It
was the largest tech IPO till then, making the company worth $104 billion.
(Alibaba listed on the New York Stock Exchange -largest stock exchange in the
world- in Sept 2014 at a company worth of $230 billion).
In the 5 years since its IPO, Facebook’s worth has almost
quadrupled to $420 billion.
Facebook has about 2 billion users, out of which 1.28
billion are daily users. That’s like all of India using Facebook daily.
Facebook designated Feb. 4, 2016 as "Friends
Day" in celebration of the social networking site's 12th birthday.
Up until 2007, the Facebook website had a pixelated face
on the top right, as part of the homepage design. That face belonged to none
other than Oscar-winning actor Al Pacino, from his younger days.
Ever wondered why Facebook is blue in colour? (Hint: It’s
not because Blue is most people’s favourite colour). It’s because Facebook
founder Mark Zuckerberg has red-green colour blindness and blue is the colour
that he can see completely.
The “Like” button that we all are always trigger-happy
with was going to be called the “Awesome” button.
Facebook’s user base grows by eight people per second or
7,246 people every 15 minutes.
For every minute that Facebook is down (inaccessible
owing to technical issues at their end) the company loses $24,420.
Facebook’s net income in 2016 was approximately $10
billion. Compare that to the worth of the entire Tata Steel Company, which is
worth about $7.29 billion.
Facebook stores approximately 300 PETABYTES of user data
on its servers. There are 1 million gigabytes in a petabyte. Compare that with
the fact that the entire written works of humankind, in every known language from
the dawn of recorded history, would occupy approximately 50 petabytes.
6,00,000 hacking attempts are made to Facebook accounts
every day.
And finally, if all the time spent on Facebook in the
last 5 years, was spent doing even minimum wage work, the global economy would
have been richer by $6 Trillion.
On that note, quickly share this nugget on Facebook and get
to work :)