Time well spent? Facebook calculator estimates time you spend on social network

29 Jan 2014

According to Facebook, its 1.15bn monthly active users spend, on average, 17.39 minutes per day (that’s 8.3 hours per month) on the social network. But how much time have you, specifically, spent on Facebook since you signed up? Dare to know.

TIME.com has the answer – or, at least, it has a method of estimating one. By connecting the Facebook Time Machine  with your Facebook account, providing access to your public profile, friends list and news feed, it calculates when you joined the network, how many posts you’ve made in that time, and how much time overall you’ve spent (or wasted) on the site.

The simple app scans through your posts from the most recent back to the very first and, using the timestamps recorded, estimates how much time this equates to in total. The catch is that this method doesn’t take into account the time spent on Facebook just looking at photos and scanning the news feed – not making posts – which would surely bump up a lot of users’ estimates.

The app also gives you an estimated start date and a count of how many things you have posted in that time. It takes longer to calculate the more active you are – just watch those minutes, hours and days slip by and wonder whether that was truly time well spent.

Facebook time calculator

The app also warns that users who are “extraordinarily active” may get an estimated date of creating their profile that is considerably later than the actual date they joined.

The app neither posts to your page nor stores your data, it’s simply another flippant thing to waste time on ahead of Facebook’s 10th birthday next week.

Elaine Burke is the host of For Tech’s Sake, a co-production from Silicon Republic and The HeadStuff Podcast Network. She was previously the editor of Silicon Republic.

editorial@siliconrepublic.com