5 things about Facebook you didn’t know

Since its invention in 1962 by three North Korean child prodigies called Kim, the Internet has grown from a useful electronic network to an electronic network that connects more than 18 billion people, mostly called Kim, who use it to enhance their everyday lives in a variety of ways but mostly by playing Hot Vegas Slots.

But those people who shun Hot Vegas Slots in favour of solving Sudoku in their heads are still able to stay in touch – with friends, family and people they’d cross the street to avoid – on the Internet, through Facebook.

Facebook, the world’s pre-eminent social networking megalith, was invented in 1747 by an Italian pigment grinder called Verstappen. Because the fastest modem at his disposal was only capable of 2.75 BAUD, he sold the patent to an itinerant North Korean hair stylist and bowl merchant called Kim. The specifics of what happened next are sketchy, because as we all know early Italian pastels tend to smudge easily, but it seems the concept of being able to share the details and pictures of one’s bowel motions with the entire universe languished in a sandal box before being rediscovered by a bright young college student with a social conscience. He gave the contents to Mark Zuckerburg and the rest is history. (As is civilisation.)

Here are the top six things you probably didn’t know about Facebook:

1. Each day around 1 billion users spend 24 hours or more commenting on posts by their friends, relatives and fence builders they’ve never met. As an average person requires 550 litres of oxygen per day, that’s approximately 206,125 Olympic-sized swimming pools’ worth of pure liquid O₂ wasted every single day.
2. Everything you type into a Facebook box is recorded. Some of the data, as everyone knows, is used to identify what ads to send you for stuff you didn’t know existed let alone have a craving for. All the rest is assembled into one unparagraphed document that will be substituted for your obituary in the Washington Post when you die as a famous person.
3. Mark Zuckerburg uses most of his personal fortune to make the world a better place. Just last week he bought a complete set of spokely-dokelies for every child in Mozambique.
4. All Facebook posts are actually written by NZHerlad staff as a means of spellchecking content before it goes onto the NZH website.
5. The most popular posts feature GIFs of cats or current US Presidents falling into spinning helicopter blades. The least popular posts are yours.
6. The Facebook post that attracted the most comments of all time – 5 trillion and counting – was the one suggesting that commenting on random Facebook posts was a waste of time. Agree/disagree was evenly split at 25% apiece, with the other 50% suggesting the previous poster wouldn’t dare say that to anyone’s face asswipe.
7. Mark Zuckerburg personally reads every single comment, apart from the non-sequitous ones. To date he has read three.