More info from the app page:
Today is Election Day in the United States and Facebook is committed to encouraging people who use our service to participate in the democratic process. As a result, Facebook is focused on ensuring that all of our users know where they can participate in this year’s elections.It's about 9:30AM on the East Coast. Even assuming that this already includes early-voting, this is a LARGE number. (Perhaps non-voters are also padding the numbers, but it's still large. I'll check back occasionally to see what's happening).
U.S. users over age 18 will see a message at the top of their Facebook News Feed reminding them that it is Election Day and to go vote. The Facebook News Feed message will also contain a link to the Facebook Polling Place Locator (http://on.fb.me/d1BVSg), an application that lets users find out where they can vote. The app was developed with data from the non-partisan Voting Information Project (http://votinginfoproject.org/) and was built by the app developer Involver (http://www.involver.com/).
9:32 AM: One million, two hundred sixty-four thousand three hundred and ninety-one.
9:43 AM: One million, three hundred seventy-five thousand one hundred forty-four.
9:53 AM: One million, four hundred eighty-one thousand six hundred fifty-three.
10:00 AM: One million, five hundred fifty-eight thousand nine hundred eleven.
UPDATE: Looking at the presented value at 11:34AM (2,646,930 people on Facebook Voted), and graphing the trend in Excel, it appears that the counter is projecting forward along a linear function that is very similar (i.e., R^2=0.9997) to y=(2x10^7)x-(5x10^6). I don't know for sure if this is just an automated counter or not, but it sure does appear so. (For example, I would have expected a major up-tick in the voting around 11AM Michigan time, as Californians voted on their way to work... of course, I would also expect an uptick as Eastcoasters go vote during lunch.)
I don't know how difficult it would be to actually have a counter that reflects the total number of Facebook users clicking on "I voted", rather than making an automated ticker. In some sense, it is easy to make an automated ticker: just run an algorithm that conforms to an equation very similar to the one above, and voila! (That it goes to a theoretical maximum of 99,999,999 people also makes it worrisome, since this could mean that the programmers set a ceiling, because they knew that it was automated.) However, such an automated ticker would seem (to me) to devalue the whole use-Facebook-to-get-people-to-vote attempt.
End note: I will continue to sporadically check on this ticker to see how much (if at all) it deviates from the above equation.
UPDATE 2 (November 2, 2010, 2:40PM ): It looks like it is an automated ticker... based on the highly linear relationship that appears not to be swayed by time of day:
I don't know how difficult it would be to actually have a counter that reflects the total number of Facebook users clicking on "I voted", rather than making an automated ticker. In some sense, it is easy to make an automated ticker: just run an algorithm that conforms to an equation very similar to the one above, and voila! (That it goes to a theoretical maximum of 99,999,999 people also makes it worrisome, since this could mean that the programmers set a ceiling, because they knew that it was automated.) However, such an automated ticker would seem (to me) to devalue the whole use-Facebook-to-get-people-to-vote attempt.
End note: I will continue to sporadically check on this ticker to see how much (if at all) it deviates from the above equation.
UPDATE 2 (November 2, 2010, 2:40PM ): It looks like it is an automated ticker... based on the highly linear relationship that appears not to be swayed by time of day:
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