Plan 9 From Cyberspace

How affected were YOU by the great Facebook crash of 2010? Was it a mere inconvenience when the social media giant caught a bug, or did it dramatically affect your job, life and overall ability to function?

A quaint school of thought may still deem the world of wall posts, pictures, and likes a frivolous waste of time, but to those in the social media biz a glitch in the system can have costly results. All of the advertisements, applications, social plugins, and other agents of Facebook's world domination were inaccessible for a brief period that fateful September day, meaning a lot of lost information—and a lot of lost revenue.

How affected were YOU by the great Facebook crash of 2010? Was it a mere inconvenience when the social media giant caught a bug, or did it dramatically affect your job, life and overall ability to function?

A quaint school of thought may still deem the world of wall posts, pictures, and likes a frivolous waste of time, but to those in the social media biz a glitch in the system can have costly results. All of the advertisements, applications, social plugins, and other agents of Facebook's world domination were inaccessible for a brief period that fateful September day, meaning a lot of lost information—and a lot of lost revenue.‍

@joeschmitt "Either Facebook is down or Mark Zuckerberg just set everything to PRIVATE."

@Lord_Voldemort: "I shut down facebook. That'll teach The Social Network for trying to steal attention from the Deathly Hallows Trailer. Take that, Zuckerberg."

@IceNinjaSquad "Facebook was down and 500 million users were forced to talk to their friends face to face. It was horrible."

And my personal favorite:

@TheDollSays: "Facebook users are roaming the streets in tears, shoving photos of themselves in people's faces and screaming, 'DO YOU LIKE THIS? DO YOU?'"

Like it or not, social media has seeped deeper into our culture than many of us would feel comfortable admitting. Have you noticed that when you log into Pandora, you're told which of your Facebook friends "like" a certain artist? Or when you look at almost any news story there's an option to "share" it with your friends?

So in the spirit of Halloween, let's take a look at some shocking statistics from socialnomics.com:

• 96% of Millennials have joined a social network
• Social media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the web
• If Facebook were a country it would be the world's 3rd largest behind China and India
• 80% of companies use social media for recruitment
• Ashton Kutcher and Ellen Degeneres (combined) have more Twitter followers than the entire populations of Sweden, Israel, Switzerland, Ireland, Norway or Panama
• YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world
• Wikipedia has over 15 million articles, and some studies show it's as accurate as Encyclopedia Britannica
• 1 out of 8 couples who got married in the United States in 2009 met via a social media network

Pretty scary, eh kids? Be safe this Halloween, and if anyone ends up with too many bite-size snickers, we'd love to take 'em off your hands.