The Internet in Real Time
December 23, 2014 12:06 PM Subscribe
"By the time you finish reading this sentence, there will have been 219,000 new Facebook posts, 22,800 new tweets, 7,000 apps downloaded, and about $9,000 worth of items sold on Amazon… depending on your reading speed, of course. Now that the Internet is widely available, just one second of global online activity is jam-packed full of events, from communication with others to data storage to entertainment options galore."
A little while ago my wife and I watched Less Than Zero, and there's a club or party scene where a bunch of televisions, all switched to a different channel, are stacked against a wall...representing, I guess, the fast-paced, non-stop media landscape we were all living in back in 1987. It seemed pretty quaint.
posted by The Card Cheat at 12:12 PM on December 23, 2014 [3 favorites]
posted by The Card Cheat at 12:12 PM on December 23, 2014 [3 favorites]
representing, I guess, the fast-paced, non-stop media landscape we were all living in back in 1987
posted by Sangermaine at 12:26 PM on December 23, 2014 [3 favorites]
posted by Sangermaine at 12:26 PM on December 23, 2014 [3 favorites]
And 99% of it (including this comment) is straight up fucking noise.
posted by symbioid at 12:27 PM on December 23, 2014 [1 favorite]
posted by symbioid at 12:27 PM on December 23, 2014 [1 favorite]
It did take me quite a while to read that sentence, actually, what with all the numerals and ellipses
posted by iotic at 12:34 PM on December 23, 2014 [1 favorite]
posted by iotic at 12:34 PM on December 23, 2014 [1 favorite]
On Facebook, people post faster than they "Like". I've noticed a good number of Facebook posters -- especially those who post a lot -- seem to be 'write only' users, happy to vague book and otherwise fish for likes, but rarely seeming to read anything. I'm guessing it's that lot which is helping the noise level.
posted by Bovine Love at 12:40 PM on December 23, 2014
posted by Bovine Love at 12:40 PM on December 23, 2014
Cool webpage; I like that kind of data visualization. Thanks for sharing.
Would be interesting to see all the data on a single display, though. All those numbers ticking over, all together - that would be strikingly illustrative of the point.
posted by paleyellowwithorange at 12:43 PM on December 23, 2014 [1 favorite]
Would be interesting to see all the data on a single display, though. All those numbers ticking over, all together - that would be strikingly illustrative of the point.
posted by paleyellowwithorange at 12:43 PM on December 23, 2014 [1 favorite]
And 99% of it (including this comment) is straight up fucking noise.
That's pretty generous IMHO.
posted by MikeMc at 1:05 PM on December 23, 2014
That's pretty generous IMHO.
posted by MikeMc at 1:05 PM on December 23, 2014
I've noticed a good number of Facebook posters -- especially those who post a lot -- seem to be 'write only' users, happy to vague book and otherwise fish for likes, but rarely seeming to read anything.
This is what the internet used to be about - people creating their own content and not obsessively tracking every little thing they consume - and it was way better.
posted by oulipian at 1:16 PM on December 23, 2014 [1 favorite]
This is what the internet used to be about - people creating their own content and not obsessively tracking every little thing they consume - and it was way better.
posted by oulipian at 1:16 PM on December 23, 2014 [1 favorite]
Why would liking things be superior to creating things?
posted by sonic meat machine at 1:23 PM on December 23, 2014
posted by sonic meat machine at 1:23 PM on December 23, 2014
You want useful realtime data? Do you...???
Number of times my dog has pooped today..... 1
I'll update this later today. Well, probably.... really, it's up to the dog...
posted by HuronBob at 1:25 PM on December 23, 2014 [2 favorites]
Number of times my dog has pooped today..... 1
I'll update this later today. Well, probably.... really, it's up to the dog...
posted by HuronBob at 1:25 PM on December 23, 2014 [2 favorites]
Sturgeon's Law: "Ninety percent of everything is crap". That was first said in 1958, when we had no internet and three TV networks. We're looking at easily 99.9% now, especially with the ease of reblogging/reposting/retweeting in the 'social web'. MetaFILTER was created specifically to support "the best of the web" and with good moderation, it still only brings the crap percentage down to 65-75% (Front Page Only, here in the comments, we're definitely 90+% crap; I know I am).
Why would liking things be superior to creating things?
It's the joy of taking credit for somebody else's creation. That's why there's such a problem with photos/drawings getting their creators' identity stripped (and often replaced, 9gag) as they are passed on.
posted by oneswellfoop at 1:29 PM on December 23, 2014 [1 favorite]
Why would liking things be superior to creating things?
It's the joy of taking credit for somebody else's creation. That's why there's such a problem with photos/drawings getting their creators' identity stripped (and often replaced, 9gag) as they are passed on.
posted by oneswellfoop at 1:29 PM on December 23, 2014 [1 favorite]
This is what the internet used to be about - people creating their own content and not obsessively tracking every little thing they consume - and it was way better.
That's not entirely true; there were scores of people making "omg im eatin a sandwich yum" statements as far back as the BBS, Compuserve/Prodigy days, which preceded IRC and microblogging. The signal-to-noise ratio seems to risen only because improvements in bandwidth and access opened the way for optimized clustering of peer groups.
posted by Smart Dalek at 1:34 PM on December 23, 2014 [1 favorite]
Theodore Sturgeon is gonna have to move that decimal point a few places to the right.
posted by sourwookie at 1:51 PM on December 23, 2014 [2 favorites]
posted by sourwookie at 1:51 PM on December 23, 2014 [2 favorites]
Every day, Facebook users like an average of 4.5 billion posts
actualy just statistical error. average person likes 5 posts per day. Zuckers Georg, who lives in hoodie and likes over 20 trillion each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted.
posted by Lemurrhea at 2:14 PM on December 23, 2014 [2 favorites]
actualy just statistical error. average person likes 5 posts per day. Zuckers Georg, who lives in hoodie and likes over 20 trillion each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted.
posted by Lemurrhea at 2:14 PM on December 23, 2014 [2 favorites]
It makes me wonder how the NSA keeps up.
posted by double block and bleed at 2:50 PM on December 23, 2014 [1 favorite]
posted by double block and bleed at 2:50 PM on December 23, 2014 [1 favorite]
double block and bleed, that is what I wondered back in 1980 or whenever it was that I read 1984 for school. If your TV is watching you, how many people does that employ and how does that get managed?
Ah, the innocence of junior high school in the days before the internet.
Now we know it's done programmatically. With enough data to feed in, and a bunch of carefully designed algorithms, law enforcement is flailing, but the marketers know everything!
posted by elizilla at 4:09 PM on December 23, 2014 [1 favorite]
Ah, the innocence of junior high school in the days before the internet.
Now we know it's done programmatically. With enough data to feed in, and a bunch of carefully designed algorithms, law enforcement is flailing, but the marketers know everything!
posted by elizilla at 4:09 PM on December 23, 2014 [1 favorite]
Number of Metafilter comments per second: maybe 0.1? That's what is nice about this site.
On the other extreme,
Tweetping is showing tweets on a global map in real time. But it's just a small subset of the 5,000 tweets per second actual rate. Previously.
posted by jjj606 at 5:58 PM on December 23, 2014 [1 favorite]
On the other extreme,
Tweetping is showing tweets on a global map in real time. But it's just a small subset of the 5,000 tweets per second actual rate. Previously.
posted by jjj606 at 5:58 PM on December 23, 2014 [1 favorite]
but the marketers know everything!
Perhaps not so much, I've been seeing industry articles about the anti-success of big data.
posted by sammyo at 8:20 PM on December 23, 2014 [2 favorites]
Perhaps not so much, I've been seeing industry articles about the anti-success of big data.
posted by sammyo at 8:20 PM on December 23, 2014 [2 favorites]
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posted by entropicamericana at 12:09 PM on December 23, 2014 [8 favorites]