Check this out from Google Trends:
Did Facebook hit an inflection point in early 2009? Google must have much better data sets, probably one reason Hal Varian left Berkeley for Google.
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I wonder how that correlates with usage.
wow. worst non-article ever.
may as well have written "here's a graph! eom"
i so wish i hadnt taken the time and bandwidth to view this on my phone.
ken's point is fair enough. i just think that a lot of times there's not much use for blah-blah-blah verbiage when s sliver of data will do.
Ken: a picture is worth a thousand words.
Razib: I think Ken wants 975 more words out of you (unless you count compound words as single words, in which case he wants 980 more words).
What I would like to know is when did Murdoch purchase myspace?
Let's be critical. Where to begin? What's an inflection point? It's said to be "a point on the curve at which curvature changes sign."
It doesn't seem to me that the upper blue (Facebook) curve changes sign anywhere. It's all going up. I don't see any particular inflection point. If anything at all happened it was at point "A" at the end of 2007. What did this mean?
The red (myspace) line looks fairly flat all along. No notable growth there. Why bother with it?
The lower two charts, labelled "News reference volume" show nothing very surprising right up to the last recorded moments of 2009, when Facebook references suddenly plunge. Is that something notable, or an artifact?
For those of us ignorant civilians not familiar with network affairs, Hal Varian's migration to Google tells us nothing.
Who is Varian? Why did he move? What has it to do with Facebook? There's a lot of implied information packed into this report that I, for one, cannot interpret.
When I started in journalism many decades ago I was advised to assume that even the most sophisticated reader should be tactfully and unobtrusively reminded of the most obvious seeming things.
We need a second derivative curve to tell. Unfortunately, even if we had one, there is likely to me too much error to make an accurate assessment. (You were expecting a mathematical response, right?) My conclusion: We need more time.
@richard luppock: inflection point does NOT mean curve has stopped going up. In fact, if you look at the rising half of a sine wave, the inflection point coincides with where the upward slope is steepest. Inflection point means the curvature has changed sign, or the second derivative. ie, curve goes from concave to convex.
When I started in journalism many decades ago I was advised to assume that even the most sophisticated reader should be tactfully and unobtrusively reminded of the most obvious seeming things.
that's a dumb comment. this is blogging, not journalism. some blogging resembles journalism, but it is not constrained to the same format as journalism.