Facebook is Loosing it's users ?

But Facebook has denied that it is losing customers, saying it is "pleased" with growth.


The number of monitoring sites Faceboook Inside Facebook has been suggested that in May, Facebook has lost six million users in the United States and 100,000 in the UK. But the network, not normally comment on the statistics of the others, asked how he arrived at that figure. Other net metering companies said they had experienced a growth during the same period.

"From time to time, we see stories about Facebook losing users in some regions. Some of these reports use data extracted from our advertising tool, which provides broad estimates on the reach of Facebook ads and isn't designed to be a source for tracking the overall growth of Facebook," the firm said in a statement.

"We are very pleased with our growth and with the way people are engaged with Facebook. More than 50% of our active users log on to Facebook in any given day," it added.

The figures from Inside Facebook claimed that 1.5 million Canadian users left the social network in May.

But overall it showed that Facebook was growing, to a total of 687 million users worldwide with many new customers coming from countries such as India, the Philippines and Indonesia.

Its figures on customer leakage do not appear to tally with those from net measurement firm comScore.

It told the BBC it had seen a 21% growth for US users on Facebook during May, while the UK gained 368,000 new recruits between February and May.

According to comScore, the average amount of time spent on the site was also up, from 21 minutes per day in December 2009 to 25 minutes per day by December 2010.

Measurement firm Nielsen said its figures also showed growth.

"There are months when figures dip but I'd be very cautious on calling a trend based on two months," said Nielsen spokesman Neil Beston.

The idea of Facebook fatigue, where users desert the social network after a certain period of time has long been talked about by experts but remains unproven.

"In developed countries such as the US and the UK Facebook penetration is hitting 50% and at that level it is inevitable that users will sign up who aren't frequent visitors," said Adrian Drury, lead analyst at research firm Ovum.

source : BBC news

Almost 56% of Americans have Internet data caps, the FCC asked to investigate

Two large Washington, DC tech political groups have asked the Federal Communications Commission to investigate the caps of Internet data in the United States with a focus on AT & T. New America Foundation and general information about the letter (PDF) Data caps are not necessarily a problem,
but that they do “carry the omnipresent temptation to act in anticompetitive monopolistic ways.” 

Unlike competitors whose caps appear to be at least nominally linked to congestions during peak-use periods, AT&T seeks to convert caps into a profit center by charging additional fees to customers who exceed the cap. In addition to concerns raised by broadband caps generally, such a practice produces a perverse incentive for AT&T to avoid raising its caps even as its own capacity expands.

Comcast comes in for the same criticism. Its 250GB per month caps were introduced several years ago, and they have not increased since despite years of network upgrades that have dramatically boosted total capacity.

The fact that AT&T has just slapped a much smaller 150GB per month cap on its basic DSL subscribers seems strange to these groups, since the new cap is substantially lower than caps introduced years ago (and Comcast has been making plenty of cash since adopting the higher caps, so any economic arguments here are suspect).

The lower cap for DSL customers is especially worrying because one of the traditional selling points of DSL networks is that their dedicated circuit design helps to mitigate the impacts of heavy users on the rest of the network. Together, these caps suggest either that AT&T's current network compares poorly to that of a major competitor circa 2008 or that there are non-network-management motivations behind their creation.

Noting that moves to artificially limit Internet use would move against the FCC's own policy of encouraging broadband deployment and use, the two groups asked the agency two investigate data caps in the US. Specifically, they want to know if any ISP-offered services are excluded from the cap, how often the cap is enforced, how customers are warned about usage levels, and whether enforcement is related to network congestion.

In a less-than-intensely-competitive market providing a key piece of modern infrastructure, these are all excellent questions to ask. One might ask them much more sharply in places like Canada, where operators insist that their 2GB or 15GB or caps are absolutely necessary to make a profit.