By the team at XA.net’s count, from Facebook’s own figures, about 495,362,600 users. Still a lot, perhaps the other 4.6mm or so are from other countries than the 186 listed, or people who live on the moon or whatever. Here’s the data in an excel sheet, along with country populations from Wikipedia for all to use as they wish (but please keep attribution intact).

Here’s the top 25 - Southeast Asia has made a big push:

Here is the full data file in Excel. Enjoy!

I just received a letter from a Financial Advisor at Merrill Lynch Wealth Management (part of Bank of America Corporation). In it, it says that “Mortgage rates are at some of their lowest historic levels” and that “For over 25 years, we have been offering innovate refinancing solutions and one of the broadest product spectrums in the industry. We have [my emphasis added] distinct options such as interest-only payments and 100% financing, as well as great rates on traditional fixed-rate mortgages.”

Yes, please promote the kinds of teaser programs that caused the huge subprime mortgage mess which in turn pretty much destroyed your company and lost you (and the American taxpayer unfortunately) over $50 billion in 2008. Cognitive dissonance is alive and well, and living in financial America.

“Smart solutions that make the most of your total financial situation - that’s the Merrill Lynch Advantage.”

As I was listening to a member of Congress saying something on the radio this morning, it occurred to me that the more online sources (wikileaks.com for example) or news stories, or previous statements in newspapers aggregated by online services, or twitter postings or for some people, foursquare.com checkins… The more this info is out there, the harder it becomes to LIE, to say misleading and untruthful things.

Perversely, however, this means that those (sociopaths?) who are able to lie convincingly, with impunity, and/or can use these sources for misdirection, will become much more powerful. The more powerful the perceived environment for lying becomes, the more powerful the gifted few who can do it well. One of the most important gifts for these people may be that of justification/convincing themselves that what they are doing is ultimately for the good… And unfortunately, though it would be nice to believe they will get found out or nipped in the long-run, we know that’s not necessarily true.

Reversion to the mean helps us understand that long streaks of good fortune, on average will not persist. But just as a run of 6 heads in a row doesn’t by itself constitute an unfair coin, so luck and self-delusion can sustain liars for far longer than we can always predict.

Looks like comScore is getting some unwanted attention yet again about once of its aliases, voiceFive, under which it installs software to track user behavior online. I believe it is lame that they do this under several different names and attempt to hide the identity of the company gathering the information. Voicefive.com is all good according to McAfee SiteAdvisor, yet there are quite a few angry comments to be found about them on the same page…

I’m sure Kaiser Permanente, Ford and Oral-B will be very happy to see their ads showing up all next to each other, having a great time there not only together but also at the very bottom of the page on 50 Cent’s website, Thisis50.com.

Now of course it’s probably not a big deal since there are already two 160×600’s and a 728×90 ad above this one in better view. They’re not actually paying a lot for the ads at the bottom of the page, are they?

Oh did I mention the ads also rotate every 60 seconds? Right now things have changed I’m looking at three Palm Pre Plus ads and another two Oral-B ads (I guess that’s what they mean by showing “3 ads per 24 hours per person”). A small example that illustrates a lot of what is wrong with display advertising — it would be like billboards along the highway if anyone who owned any property could put up as many as they liked.

Ooops by the time I wrote this, I saw ANOTHER two Oral-B ads, a Scion ad, an eBay ad, and a Bestbuy/Windows 7 ad. Thanks Traffic Marketplace, Specific Media and Advertising.com! What a great way to make money and offer incredible consumer value at the same time (not). It’s one thing to ferret out bad sites and fake impressions, but here is a problem that is less about the publisher in my opinion than it is about the ad networks’ incompetence.

And their CPM number seems very high. See release here.

Based on my estimates, I’d guess they came in about 50% on the impressions numbers and about doubled the CPM. But then what do I know?

My guess is around 24.1 billion impressions a day whereas theirs comes in around 12.2 billion a day (or around a trillion in the US for the first quarter). $2.48 as a CPM is high; the true number is quite probably in the $1.00 to $1.50 range. Especially when you look at Facebook - the CPMs there for an ad unit are in the $0.20 range on the higher end and if you look at three ads or max four ads per page, that’s $0.60-$0.80 or so.

Would love other people’s thoughts on this, back of the envelope or not.

It seems that Hilary Clinton needs to update her profile on LinkedIn - it still says she is “Candidate for President” and Senator from New York.

http://www.linkedin.com/profile?viewProfile=&key=15890911

By the way, looks like Hilary (or her people) signed (her) up a good deal later than Barack Obama, whose ID number is lower:

http://www.linkedin.com/profile?viewProfile=&key=11932467

Unsurprisingly, his profile actually indicates that he IS the President. And 14 people I know, are connected to him (which seems too high… only 2 people I know are connected to Hilary).

I was standing in line recently at the off-airport car park. We had just gotten off the shuttle, for which a few of us had had to wait an extra bit for because the previous one was full. I had noticed a man who had arrived after me and wanted to get on the earlier shuttle be turned away, and he had done that little hesitation thing that indicates displeasure, but didn’t say anything, accepting the situation,

I have seldom been accused of patience, and didn’t think too much of it. But when standing in line, this gentleman (early 40s, 6 foot 4 of moderate build) shuffled to the front of the line to see if they had opened a second window. I mentioned to him there was just one line (the line was clearly marked with yellow chevron paint on the floor) and he smiled and went back to the end of the line.

Several people were in line in front of and behind me. A minute went by and the second window did open up. The person at the front of the single line went to the new window to offer up their ticket and pay, and of course mister patience went to the front and stood behind the person at the second window.

I said to him in a nice, even manner that there was only one line and that he should get back into it. He was peeved but said he didn’t mind in that way that indicates he really does mind. The young lady in front of me thanked me.

My point in this story is not to appear like some kind of hero of the people- anything but- but to share that in a lot of situations, we have to stand up for ourselves, or have someone on our team who can be that person. The person to ask the uncomfortable question, to risk pissing off people by disturbing the herd - it can be done in a nice and a not-nice way.

As the CEO of a startup company, this role of bad cop or ‘meanie’ as I think of it, falls to me quite often. And I have done it in both ways but (I hope) usually in a very rational way. There is a danger in it too, though - if others always look to a single person to play this role they may not learn that they can and should be able to do it too.

To be effective in work and life I think we all need to be able to play that part some of the time. I suggest taking advantage of trivial situations like the annoying line jumper guy to try out and hone these skills. Because you, your family, friends, company or self will need them sometime.

I couldn’t print out my Southwest boarding pass because the page hadn’t finished loading. Turns out it was trying to get images that were taking forever to load:

http://i.xx.openx.com/250f8716d94d8b28c4cab4ff37b2c3a4.gif

Looks like Southwest is using OpenX for hosting “ads” on its boarding page site. Just seems like a silly idea.

Mozilla has a lot of interesting information and statistics about installed plug-ins, and one of my personal favorites to examine is AdBlock Plus by Wladimir Palant. Here is the stats page for it. Looking at a chart over the last 12 months, the number of active installs is fairly stable except for times like Christmas when a lot of people are seemingly not at their computers. Weekly ebbs seem pretty reasonable as well:

Right now there are 10.63 million live installs (of 78 million-odd total), with 3.5 million of those in the US, or 33%, followed by Germany at 2.1mm (19%) and Russia at 1.01mm (10%). France trails a bit further behind with 813k or 8%. The most common OS is Windows but Linux is right up there which clearly also adds to the fact of this being Firefox, to make it a far less mainstream crowd that our Internet Explorer group. It’s geeky.

While these numbers are significant they are not huge (about the size of the 400th biggest US website or so at the 3.5mm mark, if you believe the Quantcast figures) and no immediate looming threat to the advertising market. The Adblock product, on Firefox and with some configuration needed, is simply not a mainstream product. Me wonders though what some of the catalysts would/might be to make this a more mainstream phenomenon.