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Candid camera

October 15, 2008

Here's a nice snapshot of the expansiveness of today's web: Facebook has announced that it now stores 10 billion photographs uploaded by its members (as noted by Data Center Knowledge). Moreover, since it stores each photo in four different sizes, it actually has 40 billion image files in its system. More than 15 billion photos are viewed at the site everyday, and at times of peak demand 300,000 images are viewed every second. An additional two or three terabytes of photos are uploaded every day.

I did a quick scan of the 10 billion photos and found that 3 billion of them included an image of beer, in keg, can, bottle, or pitcher form, 1.5 billion included an image of a bra, and 675 million included both beer and a bra.

Posted by nick at October 15, 2008 12:24 PM

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Comments

Interesting. I wonder how you got access to the data?

Posted by: RichardMcCoy at October 15, 2008 01:29 PM

And about 500 million of them are firing-squad photos.

Posted by: Paul McFedries at October 15, 2008 02:50 PM

I wonder how you got access to the data?

I just started at the beginning of Facebook and clicked through it until I reached the end.

Posted by: Nick Carr at October 15, 2008 04:24 PM

Hello Mr. Carr, Regards from Brazil, a developing country that consumes as much electricity as avatars... Well, Facebook has got an incredible amount of workers that feed its needs with photo content and that have no payment dues on the end of the month, just as you said in your recently published book "The big switch" [I am reading it in portuguese, since I am from Brazil]. Is it the future for us all? Creating content and giving away our ideas so that companies such as Google grow richer and richer from day to day?

Posted by: JOÃO LUÍS DE ALMEIDA MACHADO at October 15, 2008 04:44 PM

Now that's funny.

Posted by: Christian Nunciato at October 15, 2008 05:19 PM

Oh, okay. Thanks for the thoughtful response.

Posted by: RichardMcCoy at October 15, 2008 09:03 PM

remember the old data mining correlation - men when shopping on Fridays buy beer and diapers?

You have officially retired that. Now we can safely say men when they surf the web on Fridays find a high correlation between beer and bra hyperlinks :)

Posted by: vinnie mirchandani at October 17, 2008 11:56 PM

Candid camera

October 15, 2008

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