Numbers can tell us a lot about technology, but only if we know them. Here are a few we don't.
(Speaking of which: Email us if you do!)
The Facebook stalker index: How many people are looking at your Facebook right now, today, this week and forever? Or, more specifically, how many views do your Facebook photos have? You know, the ones with the bikini vs. the ones without. The ones with the bong vs. the ones without. Just IMAGINE.
Twitter averages: Twitter loovvees data, and they release a lot of it. Like, did you know that the average tweet is 67.9 characters long?
The company employs some of the best data scientists in the world, so it's fair to read meaning into the numbers they don't publish, like the average number of Twitter followers. Third party estimates peg the number at below 30. We're also curious about the number of people still using the egg avatar (millions!), the percentage of people with more than 1,000 followers (one or two?) and the percentage of people who've only tweeted once.
Dropped calls: Everyone hates their carriers, because cellphone service is expensive and uneven. What nobody is sure of, though, is how their carriers compare to others. Dropped calls are a serious source of frustration for pretty much anyone with a phone, so these numbers could confirm some already damaging perceptions, which could, I dunno, throw the entire industry into chaos? Or at least be a PR disaster for one or two carriers.
Real cellphone bills: Somewhere on each carrier's computers is an awful little spreadsheet: The real average bills, after fees and overage charges, for every single cell plan on every single phone. That is, what people actually pay every month, beyond what their plan advertised. It's higher than what listed on their sites and in their stores, but it's far more important. Some carriers'; would be higher than others, which would be seen--rightfully!--as evidence of dishonesty. Of course, nobody would come out looking good: If carrier one's $70 plans usually ends up costing users $80 and carrier two's costs $82, carrier one's customers are still going to be rightly pissed off.
Gadget failure rates: Product returns are private affairs, conducted discreetly by mail and telephone. But every hardware company on earth knows exactly how shitty their products are--that is, how many come back broken, and how many get replaced. Every gadget has a non-zero failure rate, and some are probably very high. Remember the Xbox red-ring-of-death debacle? Some reports pegged the Xbox failure rate at over 50 percent, but that was well after the fact.
Ad clickthroughs: Most free things on the Internet are supported by ads. But how many people actually click on, say, those 15-second Hulu video ads, or those YouTube caption ads? Not a whole lot! Maybe even fewer than you think. To know how many people click on these things is to know how bizarrely few people buoy so much of the Internet. It might also be scary to potential advertisers, who are usually pitched some--but not all--of a site's traffic and clickthrough numbers.
Real gadget profit margins: Thanks to sites like iSuppli we know how much the different parts of a gadget cost to buy. (Not much!) What we don't know is how much they cost to put together, to market, to ship and to package--the real margin, or markup. You might not feel so good about your brand new $500 iPad if you knew exactly how many times more of its price goes toward markup than to the workers who suffered to make it.
