I think his overall point is valid.<p>I am not a Facebook user, or a heavy user of any social networks or sites, but several days ago I joined a 2nd level discussion on Reddit with a one sentence post, and wiki url, about a shipwreck that was slightly relevant to the discussion. I received about a dozen up-votes for this post.<p>After reading this article I went to Wikipedia to check their article view stats. I was slightly surprised to see that on the day I posted, the page view stats for the wiki article went from a usual 300 page views, to 1500 for that day only.<p>So even though I did not create any new content, I did perhaps influence 1200 or so people to spend a little time thinking about a shipwreck that I was thinking about, with a single sentence.<p><a href="http://stats.grok.se/en/latest/Batavia_%28ship%29" rel="nofollow">http://stats.grok.se/en/latest/Batavia_%28ship%29</a><p>edit: spelling
One thing you might not be accounting for is whether or not bit.ly is tracking Facebook's crawlers as clicks, since Facebook will follow the bit.ly link, and while bit.ly tries to exclude bots, who knows how successful it is.<p>You could test by posting a status with a bit.ly link where you're the only one who has permission to view the status, and see if you get any clicks on that link.
LOL. This guy has 1,176 Facebook 'Friends'. I have 24, and that is mainly family. And I actually have logged in to Facebook a few times, although I generally avoid it.<p>So yeah, no, I am not influential on Facebook.<p>Can anyone who actually has logged in to Facebook in the last year beat that? 24?
Clicks and views do not equate to influence; there's simply no meaningful correspondence at all. You find this out pretty quickly if you're in the business of advocacy for a cause, since there are metrics like donations, membership, attendance, and other material contributions that you can look over.<p>There are three responses: (a) find a way to make it look like clicks and views are relevant (and there's a whole set of evangelists who are into that form of self- and other forms of deception, and I believe they're all doing the world a grave disfavor), or (b) look for other metrics, or (c) don't worry about it and stick to the common wisdom regarding how to go about persuasion and networking while being essentially decent about it.
Talking regionally, I can say that Brazilians are heavy Facebook users, but it is becoming more and more common that people just loose it and over-share, or just totally forget the sense of usefulness. An increasing movement is people leaving Facebook (or threatening to).
The numbers can be even greater if you allow friends of friends to view your posts.<p>I for one read this on HN and then saw it on one of my friend's Facebook immediately after (you and I have 27 mutual friends apparently).
Yesterday HN told me I was less beautiful than I think I am. Is this an attempt to soothe my wounded vanity?<p>Edit: Pity if so, since I'm not on Facebook.