Do you ever just sit and think about how big the internet is? Okay, ‘the internet’ is a bit of a loose term as essentially it’s a load of stationary servers dotted around the world rather than the colloquial cloud that we often refer to, so how do you go about quantifying it all?
One school of thought is that the internet weighs the same as a strawberry. But another answer can be found by looking at how much content is created. For example, by me sitting here and articulating my thoughts into WordPress and then pressing ‘Publish’, I’ve just added another unique URL and another page to the internet, making it just that fraction bigger.
MBAonline have put together an infographic that breaks down what happens on average over 24 hours on the internet:
As you can see, there’s a heck of a lot of content being created on a daily basis that we sometimes take for granted. If you are a prolific social network user, you might want to think about how much of your time and effort is spent contributing to the ever-growing phenomenon that is the internet, and take a moment to imagine what it would be like if your endeavours suddenly disappeared.
The nuts and bolts of the internet are the servers scattered across the world that I mentioned right at the start of this blog. So while you may think your Facebook profile is your profile, it’s hosted by Facebook on a server farm somewhere, and if anything catastrophic happened there, you’d lose all of the content you’ve spent years creating. If you are thinking about backing up your Facebook or other social networks, SocialSafe can handle Twitter, Google+, Viadeo, LinkedIn (coming soon), as well as Facebook Profiles and Pages.