ColdFusion - How BIG is Facebook? (Reduces Human Empathy)

Episode Date: April 21, 2026

Learn the true history and size of Facebook as well as its impact on society. Currently still in Europe, so enjoy this video in the mean time. Documentary on the history of YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4dT-lW9260 Documentary on Google: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-79uIRQiAFM // Soundtrack // Nick Leng - Crawled Out Of The Sea Vindata - Keep On Mighty Oaks - Like An Eagle Unknown :( JackLNDN - Aeterna William French - Blue Heron Lanterns On The Lake - Keep On Trying Rika - October » Google + | http://www.google.com/+coldfustion » Facebook | https://www.facebook.com/ColdFusionTV » Patreon | https://www.patreon.com/ColdFusion_TV » My music | http://burnwater.bandcamp.com or » http://www.soundcloud.com/burnwater » Collection of music used in videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOrJJKW31OA Editing website: www.cfnstudios.com ColdfusTion Android Launcher: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=nqr.coldfustion.com&hl=en » Twitter | @Coldfusion_TV --- ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You are watching Cold Fustin TV. Welcome to another Cold Fustin video. Degogo here. Humans are social beings. Naturally, most of us want to know more about each other and what each other are doing at a given time. We also tend to follow trends of what's socially going on around us. There's a bit of a famous experiment that shows this.

To summarize, it states, Put one person in the middle of the street and make him stare up at the sky, and he's crazy. Put a group of people in the middle of the street, and make them stare up at the sky and more people will stop to look. There must be something interesting up there. That many people just can't be wrong. This intrinsic human nature is one of the keys to success

of what we now call social media. In this video, we'll take a fresh perspective on the origins of a man and a website that changed the world. And then we'll take a look at some amazing facts about Facebook and how much they really own. And finally, we'll finish off with Facebook's impact on society. We're going to have a lot of fun today, guys. Let's dive in. In the mid to late 1990s, the internet was seen as the new economy.

Tech companies were hot and internet companies were pure fire. Investors pumped millions of dollars into any company that just had a dot com at the end of their name, even if they didn't have any plans on making money. The year is 1998 and the first true social media website decided to go public. They were called the globe.com. The globe's value rose 606% on the first day that they went public, a record that still stands today. But by the next year, the company had lost 95% of its value. Why?

Well, it was because of the economic dot-com crash mainly, but it was also due to the fact that these guys lacked discipline and a plan. After they went public, they spent a lot of money on lavish parties without actually doing any work. So the globe did prove that social media was a popular and intuitive idea as a pure concept, but in order to work, it needed a company in a framework with a strong sense of direction. If only someone could exploit the natural human trait of wanting to be connected to its full potential, it could be huge. Meanwhile at this time, a bright young kid named Mark Zuckerberg had learnt programming from his father and had already written his own software by middle school.

Mark's dad had hired a software developer to tutor the young programmer. Mark's tutor famously stated that Mark was a prodigy and it was actually tough to stay ahead of him. In high school, Mark and a friend built a media player called Synapse. It used machine learning to learn listeners habits and recommend music that it thought they would like. Synapse was such an intriguing concept that it gained the attention of Microsoft and other global players.

But Mark wasn't settling. He wanted a bigger challenge. By the time Mark graduated from high school and entered Harvard, he was a seasoned programmer. At Harvard, he wrote a program called FaceMash, and it was essentially a version of Hot or not with a voting and ranking system. FaceMash went live on the weekend and by Monday, Harvard servers had crashed and the students couldn't even get on the internet. It was that popular. Around this time, the second generation of social media was actually starting to take off. MySpace and Friendster were gaining ground. Three Harvard students, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss

and Divya Narenda had been working on a site called Harvard Connection for a year and had recently lost two programmers to graduation. They were looking for a new talented program to continue the work. After hearing about the face-mash phenomena, it was clear that Mark was their guy. Mark hopped on board, but he had other ideas. Although it shrouded in controversy, it said that Mark actually betrayed the Harvard crew by working on his own site while continuing to delay work on the Harvard Connection. In the end, Mark took inspiration from the social idea of Harvard Connection and the Facebook was conceived, and its name was later changed to Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg had the rare insight to see that sharing information could be the

the center of people's lives and as we know the rest was history. You can no longer think of Facebook as just a social network. Today Facebook Incorporated is much bigger than that. Studies have predicted that Facebook is going to lose 80% of its user base by the year 2018. So the company has no choice, they have to venture out into new frontiers. There'll be more on this later. But first, here are some fun facts about the company.

So how big is it? On the web is the second largest site after Google, and YouTube comes in at third. As a side point, if you want to see my documentaries on both YouTube and Google, please see the description below. Facebook currently has 1.3 billion active users per month. Every 20 minutes on Facebook, 1 million links are shared, 2 million friends are requested, and 3 million messages are sent.

There have been 100 billion friend connections, 1.3 trillion likes, and 250 billion photos since Facebook went live. Here's an interesting one. Originally, the Facebook engineers wanted to call the like button the awesome button. Alright, so how much is Facebook worth? Today, Facebook is worth over $200 billion, and that's twice the value of eBay, Yahoo, Group on LinkedIn, Netflix, IAC, AOL, and Pandora combined. In 2009, the Oxford Dictionary's word of the year was the verb unfriend.

Alright, so that's all nice. But what about Facebook's physical side? Well, let's enter the data center. When you type in Facebook.com, your request goes to the open internet, and that internet lands right here. And from right here, we request from one of the Facebook servers, your profile, and all the information associated with it. Our data centers work and compile all that information and then send it back to you right across the open internet again. And all of that happens in milliseconds. Facebook's Data Center is a modern engineering and computing marvel.

It's over three football fields and area, and has 21 and. million feet of fiber optic cable. There are thousands of servers arriving daily and just one of those servers is 500 terabytes of storage. That's 130 billion times more than the first PCs. The data center sees 100 petabytes of photos and videos per day and for those of you wondering that's 100,000 gigabytes. In case of a power failure, there are 14 3 megawatt generators on standby. So we know Facebook Incorporated is now a huge company but let's turn it up a notch what are some of the other things that Facebook are doing behind the scenes let's take a look at some of their

acquisitions so many of us know that Facebook has bought Instagram and WhatsApp but what are some other interesting acquisitions up to February 15 2014 Facebook's acquisitions were really run-of-the-mill but then they bought Oculus VR although I wish I knew what Facebook was going to do with Oculus there's no information out about that yet but what I can safely say is that it looks like Facebook thinks this is going to be the next big thing what do I mean by this? So initially Facebook was popular for photos and still is one of the biggest photo sharing sites. And now you can see that slowly starting to transition to videos. And in the

future, I think Facebook thinks that virtual reality will be the next way of sharing and interacting with each other. Facebook did announce that there will be support for 3D spherical videos on the news feed page. So users can view live action virtual reality right from their news feed. On March 27, 2014, Facebook board a company specializing in high altitude unmanned aerial vehicles. The reason for this is internet.org. Welcome back, Facebook unveiling new details about its drone that will beam the internet back down to Earth. Liz McDonald is in the business center. Looking to this new drone and it's massive, Liz.

Yeah, that's right. Good morning, Maria, good morning everybody. It is massive. It's about the size of a Boeing 737, that's according to Facebook. And basically, Facebook will be testing the solar power drone this summer in order to beam the internet, it hopes to up to 3 billion people around the world who do not have the internet. The first test flights were completed in March 27th 2015 and it does look to be like this is actually going to go ahead. Other recent acquisitions include a fitness tracking company, speech recognition and an e-commerce company. Alright so what else is there? Well one of the big things that Facebook is starting to get really keen on is artificial intelligence. Their artificial intelligence is actually pretty good at video recognition

which any computer scientists will tell you is actually still quite a hard thing to achieve. Right now Facebook's artificial intelligence can tell what sport is being played in a video without any help just like a human would. The reason behind this is if the artificial intelligence can tell what's going on in a video, it can recommend things that it thinks you would like at a deeper level. So what else are Facebook playing to do with such powerful artificial intelligence? They just state they're going to advance the field of machine intelligence that would give people a better way to communicate. Facebook also boasts that they're going to have the best artificial intelligence lab in the world. So that's kind of interesting,

but hearing that may unnerve a few people out there. Okay, so we're reaching towards the end of the video, but before we continue, let's take a quick YouTube ad break, and then we'll be back after this. Okay, so we're back. What about Facebook's impact on society? Well, as most of you know, there's been a recent backlash against Facebook

in the past couple of years. Some have called it a hijacking of the mind, while others have called it straight-up narcissism, and yet others call it a replacement of our natural social reality with a virtual one. A common example raised from the anti-social media movement was that it's becoming commonplace for people to know one another just on the most superficial levels

rather than the essence of one's character. No one ever just talks or calls or just catches up anymore. It's just a Facebook message and that's good enough. Instead of going and catching up with someone, you just talk to them on chat. For me personally, I don't think Facebook is all that bad. I can see Facebook is valuable for keeping in touch with friends and family that are far away, just checking in to see what friends are up to and organizing events. That being said, Facebook shouldn't be taken too seriously.

In addition to the above complaints, there are actually some medical concerns for a generation growing up with a large part of their social life in virtual form. See that blue area of the brain? That's the area that learns empathy. What they found is that those areas that learn empathy are only active when you do nothing, when you daydream. And that's something today's teenagers don't do.

They're not activating these brains. areas that are important for self-reflection and reflecting on other people and allowing that empathy to emerge. Empathy is the capacity to understand what another person is experiencing from the other person's frame of reference. In other words, the capacity to place oneself in another's shoes. And this is an important part of human nature. So really, it's actually healthy to sometimes stop and reflect and also think about others in your life. All right, so let's move on from the deep insights into some other quirky aspects of Facebook's impact on society. Of course Facebook has obviously revolutionized digital marketing, but what else is there?

Well, there's a little thing called ambient awareness, and this is the first time this phenomenon has been seen in human history as well. Let me break it down. Because we're in constant contact with our friends, we just have a new type of social awareness where we know what everyone's doing the majority of the time. To put it another way, it's a bit like physically being near someone and picking up those subtleties, picking up their mood or unconsciously mirroring their body language, and somewhat having their feelings rub off a new.

It really is an interesting concept, and we'll see how this evolves in society in the future. So in conclusion, the past decade has socially been brand new territory. Never before has the world been so connected intimately. Facebook has changed the way we communicate and perceive relationships. The sheer amount of data that has processed every day is mind-boggling, and it's amazing that this technology enables us to stay in contact with friends and family from around the world cheaply and easy. And just to think, it just took one college kid with a bit of determination and a borrowed idea

to truly change the world. So if you've got an original idea, take the steps to make it happen. Who knows what it could end up being? Facebook may not be around forever, but it surely has paved the way for a new, connected world. And before I leave, just as a little bonus to put what we've seen into perspective, here's There's a video of Mark Zuckerberg talking about the Facebook before it was famous. This video dispels the notion that Mark knew just how big Facebook was going to get. He really just was a casual college kid.

Cheers guys, thanks for watching. Tell us you know simply what Facebook is and what it does. So I think Facebook is an online directory for colleges. Yeah, I mean, I think that the goal that we went into it with wasn't to make an online community, but sort of like mirror for the real community that existed in real life. And where do you take in Facebook at this point? You're going to expand to those other schools that you're not at. And then what?

I mean, there doesn't necessarily have to be more. You know, I mean, like a lot of people are focused on, like, taking over the world. They're doing like the biggest thing, getting the most users. And I mean, I think like part of making a difference in doing something cool is focusing intensely. Like, I really just want to see everyone focus on college and create a really cool college director of your product. product that just like is very relevant for students and like has a lot of like information that people care about when they're in college so I don't know what that is and it's not everything that's on the Facebook now old Houston it's me

thinking