Management

What the web can do in one minute

What has an oil tanker in common with the Internet? Further more, what happens on the web every minute of the day – every day?   

No dear reader, I have not finally cracked. This topic occurred to me when I became aware that a team at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) has launched a project to re-create the first web page. These are the same people who dug that 27km. tunnel under Switzerland just to fire subatomic particles in the thing called the Hedron Collider.

The aim is to preserve the original hardware and software associated with the birth of the web. The World Wide Web was developed by the professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee while working at CERN. The initiative coincides with the 20th anniversary of the research centre giving the web to the world.

According to Dan Noyes, the web manager for CERN’s communication group, re-creation of the world’s first website will enable future generations to explore, examine and think about how the web is changing modern life. The full story can be found readily in our favourite way but it is worth remembering that this tool which Tim, the title came much, much later, gave away for free had a simple front page with some links.

What was different about the first browser was that one was allowed to write directly into content. After all researchers were intended as the users of this tool and communicate with each other.

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A screen shot from the first browser

Those who saw it say it was “amazing and sophisticated”. Indeed it was but they certainly did not imagine where this would lead to 20 years later.

Intel, the company that designs and builds computing devices, such as the CPU in your computer, provides an interesting snapshot of how much is completed on the Internet in only 60 seconds. Almost 640,000 GB of global IP data is transferred. More than 200 million emails are sent, while 1300 new mobile users become connected. With the rise of popular Apple and gadgets, 47,000 app downloads occur in only a minute.

Well-known Internet companies also experience a heavy-amount of usage. Amazon logs $83,000 in sales per minute, while Pandora plays 61,141 hours worth of music. Twitter, now seven years old, experiences 100,000 new tweets and more than 320 new accounts per minute. LinkedIn signs more than 100 new accounts, while Flickr gets 20 million photo views. Facebook, the world’s largest social-media company, receives 6 million views and 277,000 logins per minute. This company is a force to be reckoned with.

Google, the king of search, receives more than 2 million queries per minute. However, video is also an impressive category for the company. Google’s YouTube receives 1.3 million video views per minute, while uploading 30 hours of video.

Video continues to be a strong point for the Internet and Google leads the way. According to comScore, a leader in measuring several aspects of the digital world, Americans are still viewing massive amounts of video online. The company recently announced that data from its Video Metrix service showed 178 million US Internet users watched 33 billion online content videos in February.

As normal, Google sites generated the highest number with 11.3 billion videos and easily logged the highest average engagement among the top ten online properties.

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Netflix will now hit 46 million domestic streaming subscribers by 2015, up from his prior estimate of 43 million.

As seen in the Intel graphic, the trend is Netflix’s friend. Today, the number of networked devices equals the global population. By 2015, the number of networked devices is expected to be double the globe’s population.

And all that is generated because there are now some 48 billion pages to peruse.

But how big is that? Fortunately Randall Munroe of XKCD fame has answered the question in a fun way over on his What If? site. He explains:

“There are a lot of ways to estimate the amount of information stored on the Internet but we can put an interesting upper bound on the number just by looking at how much storage space we (as a species) have purchased.

“The storage industry produces in the neighborhood of 650 million hard drives per year. If most of them are 3.5″ drives, then that’s eight litres of hard drive per second. Since a single supertanker can carry 350 million litres in the oil compartment alone this is then nearly one year’s worth of 3.5” hard drives.

“This means the last few years of hard drive production which, thanks to increasing size, represent a large chunk of global storage capacity and would just about fill an oil tanker. So, by that measure, the Internet is smaller than an oil tanker.”

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