Today we enjoy this exciting opportunity to proudly congrat our fellow New Yorker Mark Zuckerberg on his great achievements, widely recognized worldwide and rewarded by Time magazine “Person of the Year”2010 title [1]. His utmost popular social networking web portal (Facebook.com [2]) is the most prominent milestone on the Internet evolution timeline, pertinent to the current decade. The web site and associated set of integrated applications quickly became a societal phenomenon, pretty much like the Microsoft Windows or Office application suite, or Google search engine, introduced in the last century. In this regards, to honor the outstanding technological vision, creativity and the contribution to the modern society made by Mark Zuckerberg (in both online and offline aspects), I would like to propose (draft version) to extend the existing System International [3] with the unit of Internet Social Network Efficiency: 1 Zuck.

Proposed Internet Social Network Efficiency (ISNE) is a quantitative measure, normalized on the scale 0…1 (where 1 is the maximum theoretically possible value) and calculated as follows:

ISNE = (Reach/100) * (DT/1440),

where Reach reflects the percent of global Internet users who visit the site (the widely used internet metric [4]) , and DT stands for average daily time in minutes spent on the site, relative to the total of 1440 per day. ISNE of 1 Zuck corresponds to the maximum theoretically possible internet social network efficiency, representing the hypothetical case of all existing internet users spending all of their time daily on the one particular web site. It’s relevant to note, that this highly theoretical case has very distant probability of occurrence, but the actual values (which expected to be the small fractions of 1 Zuck), calculated for the various sites could be effectively used for the comparative web analysis. Following is the practical ISNE computation based on Alexa™[4] ratings for the Facebook.com domain [2]  as of Dec 15th 2010:

• Average Daily time on site in minutes, rounded to the whole number: 31 [4],
• Reach (Percent of global Internet users who visit Facebook.com on prior day): 39 [4],
• ISNE = (0.39) * (31/1440) = 0.008396 Zuck

or approximately: 8.4 mZuck (m stands for milli: see the table of standard SI prefixes at [3])

As it was stated above, the ISNE is normalized on the scale 0…1 and could be characterized as the “dynamic” or “activity” metric of the web site. Additional metric could be added to define the Extended ISNE (xISNE) reflecting also the size of client base. In other words, represents the number of the site's registered users (RU) relative to the total world population (WP). This metric is representative of more “static” property of the site: user could be just registered, but not active, and still the public profile info would be made available to others, contributing to the overall Internet data pool. Thus, Extended ISNE could effectively complement the core ISNE, calculated as:

xISNE  = ( 100*ISNE + RU/WP)/101

xISNE is also normalized on the scale 0…1 with some arbitrary weighing coefficient of 100 added to core ISNE in order to “balance” the relative importance of two factors.  Practical xISNE computation for [2] could be as following: assuming the number of registered users as roughly estimated 500m [5] and the current world population as of 6,768m [6]:

xISNE = (100*0.008396 + 500/6768)/101 = 0.009044 Zuck,

or approximately 9 mZuck.

The same analytical/computational technique pertinent to ISNE/xISNE could apply essentially to any existing website, providing the representative quantitative metric to be used in comparative web analysis.

Afterword

In the near future I plan to modify the Scientific Calculator ZENO-5000 [7] by adding the special functions enabling users to calculate ISNE and xISNE. The Calculator will be placed in public domain, available free of charge. Stay tuned and watch the news on [8].
And, one more time: Congratulations to Mark Zuckerberg, and welcome, 1 Zuck!

References

1. Time magazine
2. Facebook.com
3. International System of Units
4. Alexa.com
5. Facebook™ statistics
6. CIA The World Factbook
7. Scientific Calculator ZENO-5000
8. Educational Web Portal (beta)

Copyright© 2010 Alexander Bell