9 MILLION HOURS Wasted on Facebook by Southampton Students in 2010

The year of 2010, more commonly referred to as the year of Facebook. In the summer, the website surpassed 500 million users. Headlines such as “Planet Facebook”, and “If Facebook were a Country, it would be the third biggest in the World” were thrown around left right and centre.

There has been the introduction of ‘like’ buttons all over the web, countless new updates to the website, the most recent profile updates being particularly noteable:

The latest profile update has seen techies 'hack' their profiles into art

If you can remember back to all the ‘privacy outrage’ earlier in the year, which led to the worldwide ‘Quit Facebook Day‘, it was a huge flop. Only 30,000 users quit the website, approximately 0.006% of users.

More recently we’ve had The Social Nework film, detailing the story of the founding of Facebook, which has escalated Mark Zuckerberg, the site’s founder, to true celebrity status. He won ‘Person of the Year‘ award in Time Magazine, beating Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, and the Chilean Miners.

Jesse Eisenberg (Mark Zukerberg) & Justin Timberlake (Sean Parker) in The Social Network

Now out of all this fantastic news for Facebook, there is one statistic that stands above the rest. Research conducted by the Soton Tab has confirmed that the average Southampton student spent AT LEAST 1 HOUR on Facebook every single day in 2010.

Now this doesn’t sound too bad, right? Think again. There are around 25,000 students in Southampton University – meaning that in total Southampton students wasted over 9 MILLION hours on the website.

It is impossible to wander through the library without seeing Facebook open on a computer screen

To quote Sean Parker from The Social Network, “We lived in farms, then we lived in cities, and now we’re gonna live on the internet!”

Scarily, Sean might have actually had a point when he said this.