Depressing Facebook tool calculates how many days of your life you have wasted on the site

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Andrew Feinberg

White House Correspondent

If you’ve ever had sleepless nights wondering how much of your life has been idled away on Facebook, a tool has at last been developed that means you can stop wasting your time.

Created to coincide with the social media site’s 10th birthday next week, the calculator estimates to the minute how much of the past decade you have spent posting, liking and poking.

While Facebook itself does not release information on individual user log-in times, by accessing data on when you joined the site and how often you’ve posted things to your feed, the tool is able to guess roughly how many days of your life “you’ve wasted”.

Developed by TIME Magazine, it then gives you the option to “brag about it” via Twitter or, naturally, Facebook itself.

Though the results may be depressing, they translate to big profits for the company set up Mark Zuckerberg and a few friends on 4 February 2004.

Analysts say Facebook may have had its best ever quarter in terms of revenues, which for 2013 are forecast to have risen almost 50 per cent to $7.6 billion, according to the Financial Times.

The company will report on its earnings on Wednesday, and it’s expected to be positive news for investors in the wake of a number of gloomy reports predicting the site’s demise.

If it really is true that Facebook is an “infectious disease” that will see 80 per cent of users “recover” by 2017, it seems a lot of people are going to have a great deal more time on their hands.