What is it that compels the human race to waste so much of their time? Why do we sit for endless hours in front of a screen, watching people who are being paid to act? Or spend even more time sitting in front of a different kind of screen, chatting with friends, checking email, surfing the web, or worse, playing mindless, pointless and stupid games on Facebook? What is so attractive about sitting and doing virtually nothing for hours on end, letting your brain die a slow and painful death of a thousand screams? What compels humans to watch an average of 4-5 hours of TV a day? I am going to completely ignore the TV argument, and focus on Facebook.

As of a December article by Erick Schonfeld, Facebook has passed MySpace, the other big timewaster, and is starting to overtake Google! There are now 140 million Facebook users, who can waste their time on 52,000 different applications created by a team of 660,000 developers! Users currently spend 2.6 billion (that’s with a b) minutes a DAY on Facebook. It is on track to pass Google sometime this year, if it hasn’t already. All this from a startup social networking tool that was created to replace the ancient outdated college books. All of you’re hard work has brought about a company that is now worth a hefty $15 billion, now the 5th most valuable internet company. More than half of you log on every day, and then proceed to spend an average of 19 minutes before moving on with your life.

So what does all this lead too? It leads too over 700 million photos uploaded every month, over 4 million videos uploaded per month, and over 15 million pieces of content (links, stories, notes like this one, etc…) per month!! Now, one thing you do have to remember is that these numbers are international values, and take into account the 70 percent of the users who are outside of the U.S.

So what is the point of all this? To be honest, there wasn’t really any point to it… I just felt like doing something more productive then yet ANOTHER quiz that have no purpose except to let everyone know a couple little known facts about you. So to wrap it all up, next time you think about getting on Facebook, first ask yourself what you are going to do… Are you getting on to network with friends, which is what it was designed for? Or are you just going to waste your average 19 minutes on some stupid application that requires no skill and has no redeeming quality?