When Internet.org released a white paper this week detailing – among other things – Facebook’s technologies and tools the company has developed in order to plug the whole world into the Matrix get the entire world online, it also gave us a sneak peek into the sort of data they handle on a daily basis. And to no one’s surprise, one of the things we love using Facebook for the most is – gasp! – uploading and sharing photos.
“More than 250 billion photos have been uploaded to Facebook, and more than 350 million photos are uploaded every day on average,” the social network revealed. A number of that magnitude may be a bit shocking at first, but given how a lot of Facebook users access the site via their smartphones coupled with how dependent we are on this device as a camera, the numbers make sense. Also to not be ignored is the fact that Facebook owns Instagram, a quickly growing app – from which plenty of users push photos to Facebook.
“Facebook is the largest image-sharing site on the Internet, and images represent the largest source of data usage on Facebook,” the white paper stated. The average Facebook user’s love for photography is the reason why the social network acquired Instagram and why it continually improves the photo-sharing experience, most recently through the site’s new Shared Albums feature that allows contacts to collaborate and collate images in one album. It is because of this that efforts to optimize photo uploads on the site in terms of resolution and format is in progress, all for the overall goal of efficiency.
The information Facebook provided about the number of photos they house on the company servers is only a small piece of an even more gigantic pie. Everyday, according to the paper, there are over 4.75 billion items shared on Facebook all over the world, including status updates, wall posts, photos, videos, and comments. Additionally, over 4.5 billion Likes are unleashed into the Facebook ether on a daily basis, along with more than 10 billion messages. No wonder it has to build such massive data centers; we’re becoming virtual pack rats.
[Image via Flickr]
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