The NFL has a tradition in which each Super Bowl is met with a Roman numeral system, for example this year Super Bowl 46 is titled Super Bowl XLVI, there’s just one problem with that setup it turns out school aged children are completely confused by the old school numbering system.

It turns out that while many kids know the basics of Roman numbers (X, I, V, etc) they don’t understand larger numbers. Speaking to the Associated Press one mother said Roman numerals “only ever get used for things like copyrights or sporting events. which in my humble opinion harkens even further back to the gladiatorial barbaric nature of things like the Super Bowl.”

Apparently the Roman numeral system is a barbaric act rather than a way to teach children about a historically relevant numbering system, but that is of course just one mothers opinion.

While teachers only educate students about the very basics of the Roman numeral system in school these days websites such as Numericana.com pick up the slack and not surprisingly receive a ton of pageviews around Super Bowl Sunday as fans attempt to figure out which Super Bowl we are currently enjoying.

When asked why the Super Bowl hasn’t changed to a modern name numbering system an NFL historian noted that “It just kind of sounds like an inventory. ‘Inspected by Joe,’” and “Those Roman numerals, they’re almost like trophies.”

In the meantime we are nearing Super Bowl L which has some NFL officials worried that the “L” will translate to the sign for “Loser” when a persons hand is raised to their forehead in the shape of an L such as this:

Do you think the Super Bowl numbering system is archaic and needs to be changed or is it too far set in our minds to forget about?

Super Bowl XLVI’s Roman Numerals Confuses A Younger Generation is a post from: The Inquisitr

Excellent point, seven, and misdirection only works for so long.

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When math gets bitchy is a post from: The Inquisitr

So. Facebook has 400 million members and apparently 175 million daily uniques; which is more than the number of members Facebook had in January 2009. The service already serves up more photos that anyone else in the world. In other words the numbers are huge.

Sounds pretty good doesn’t it, especially if you are company being told that you would have access to all those members as long as you have some social media flack to hold your hand.

I have real problems with numbers like this, just as I have always been suspect of the massive numbers always claimed by software companies as being indicative of the number of people actually using the software.

After all does the millions of downloads claimed by Firefox take into account the different versions that already existing Firefox users will automatically download. Do the numbers take into account people like myself who have downloaded just about every version but end up not using it.

No they don’t take any of that into account. All the numbers across the versions are amalgamated to provide a single number to show the world. It doesn’t matter if people like myself never actually use the software because Firefox has it’s number so it’s happy.

Twitter has the same sort of problem but in reverse which causes the company a lot of problems over the perception of adoption of the service. Many sources put the membership of Twitter around the 4 million mark but their traffic numbers don’t match up this. The problem is that the vast majority of Twitter users never go to the actual Twitter site  but rather use third party clients. So really any claims of traffic numbers for Twitter will always be suspect.

So now we have Facebook bragging about having 400 million members but really how many are actual active members?

Facebook can’t use the Twitter excuse of 3rd party clients stealing away pageviews from the Facebook site itself. So if we are to take any stock in the numbers tossed out by Sandberg at Davos that Facebook is crossing the 175 million unique visits per day this means that approximately one third of their claimed userbase is visiting at any one time.

So what are those other 225 million supposed members doing?

Sure it sounds great to be able to say you have 400 million members but really if almost two thirds of your userbase isn’t using the service that large number rings kind of hollow.

This doesn’t change the fact that Facebook is huge but I would imagine if we were to pop the hot air of the number’s balloon we would find the real member count isn’t near what is being trumpeted.

Facebook member numbers and the hot air of the PR balloon is a post from: The Inquisitr

Everyone is carrying on about the meteoric rise of Twitter following the recent race between Aston Kutcher and CNN for that magical one million follower number. Celebs and other well known people climbing on the Twitter bandwagon as if it is the greatest thing in their lives.

But, for as quickly as its numbers are rising one has to wonder if those numbers in anyway reflect the number of people sticking with the service.

Well according to the Nielsen Wire blog Twitter is suffering from some of the lowest retention numbers of social media services. Where services like Facebook and MySpace experience a 70 percent retention rate of new members Twitter is lucky if it can manage 30 percent. Only since the Oprah, Kutcher and CNN explosion has Twitter’s retention rate managed to reach 40 percent but there is nothing to suggest so far that we’ll see that number stick.

As Dave Martin, Nielsen Online Vice President, said in the post

By plotting the minimum retention rates for different Internet audience sizes, it is clear that a retention rate of 40 percent will limit a site’s growth to about a 10 percent reach figure. To be clear, a high retention rate doesn’t guarantee a massive audience, but it is a prerequisite. There simply aren’t enough new users to make up for defecting ones after a certain point.

I’ve always maintained, and still do, that sign up numbers actually mean very little. In most cases we are dealing with first blush popularity puffing up the numbers but in the cold light of day they have no lasting value. In this case Twitter might appear to be exploding across the landscape but beyond the initial flood of celebs and other glitterati just how many of them will still be around in a month, in six months or a year. Will the numbers still show the same type of growth at that point or will they settle down to the more realistic count of actual users.

[top graphic courtesy of CFO Strategist – graph courtesy of Nielsen Online]

The numbers Twitter doesn’t want you to know about is a post from: The Inquisitr