Leave it to a PR announcement to omit critical details.
Unless shown otherwise, I will assume this number includes anyone whom Facebook sent an email to or whom ended up on a page that loaded a script from a Facebook property.
Facebook doesn’t measure usage quite so haphazardly. This has been a topic of discussion earlier, and relevant to their SEC / financial filings. Viewing an embedded widget doesn’t count, but clicking it or signing in to an app with Facebook does.
Well, I don't see Mark claiming any of that in this post.
If your machine requests data from Facebook's machine, it's a use of Facebook. There's no way around that.
If Facebook sends personalized content in that request, then there really is no argument that this does not constitute a technical use of Facebook.
However, in most cases, users are not voluntarily making those requests to Facebook, but are more or less forced into making them by some third party (eg. any site using Facebook for a comments section).
Why does everyone always think Facebook is lying when it comes to these type of things? What good does it serve them to do so?
Seems to me it is mainly just due to the fact that most here haven't worked at anything anywhere close to FB scale and can't believe it can actually be true.
Who thinks they are lying? The same sentence can mean different things to different people depending on what definition is assigned to the words, among other things.
Unless shown otherwise, I will assume this number includes anyone whom Facebook sent an email to or whom ended up on a page that loaded a script from a Facebook property.