The Future Is Here Today...Robots, Genetics, AI, Longevity, Singularity

Enter The Yottabyte – One Billion Petabytes!

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by Keith Kleiner on November 3rd, 2009

I just saw a story about the NSA gearing up a datacenter to potentially hold a yottabyte of surveillance data. The whole surveillance angle itself is pretty interesting, but what caught my attention was the concept of the yottabyte.   The yottabyte is 1024 bytes. That is three levels above the petabyte, which itself is a million gigabytes. If that doesn’t make much sense to you, here is a chart from wikipedia that might help:

yottabyte

As little as 10 years ago the petabyte seemed just as large and amazing as the yottabyte sounds today. Now it is common for companies such as Google or Facebook to hold several petabytes of information in just one of their many datacenters across the world.

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The Power of Massive Twitter Accounts – Or Lack Thereof

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by Keith Kleiner on September 16th, 2009

timoreilly-retweetOne of the most interesting and sensational aspects of Twitter are its mega accounts: Twitter accounts with huge numbers of followers.  These days mega accounts have anywhere from 1 million to 3 million followers, but in the future they will boast much larger followings.  Is a Twitter account with 10 million followers around the corner?  Absolutely!  How about 100 million or more?   But as with many things in life, it isn’t just size that matters.  What is the use of millions of followers if most of them are not really listening?  Its not just quantity that matters, it is also quality.  In the last few months Singularity Hub has had the privilege of having its stories retweeted by three mega Twitter accounts, accounts with roughly 1,000,000 followers.  What have we learned about the power, or lack thereof, of these massive Twitter accounts and what does it all mean for the future of the Twitter communication paradigm?

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