Twingly – Social Data with Passion

Yesterday me and Niclas read an article about some Facebook statistics, which showed quite impressive numbers. 250 million registered users is a lot of people and the fact that almost half of them uses the service at least once a day shows that Facebook is a huge actor in the social ecosystem of the web. The rest of the numbers presented is just as impressive.

1 billion photos uploaded per month is more than 380 photos per second. If you assume that each file is 1 MB, which might be a bit low even if we assume that a lot of the files are low resolution, that’s 380 MB of photos each second that is received, processed and stored. 1 TB of photos each 40 minutes, every day, all year long. This is equal of 3 gigabit per second, photos only.

It wouldn’t be completely impossible that the amount of video data uploaded each second is at least half of the photo data uploaded each second. Even though the number of uploaded videos is just one hundredth of the number of uploaded photos the video files from digital cameras quite often can have a very large file size compared to their length. All these videos must also be processed and encoded, and video is much more CPU consuming than simple photos.

As the social networks grow, so does the load on them. What if it was possible to let users connect their accounts with already existing ones on other web services? Imagine being able to hook your photo albums to Flickr or Picasa Web Albums, the video section to your YouTube account and the journal to your already existing blog. Imagine if comments made inside the social network also was visible in the services you hooked your account to?

I really hope this will happen soon!