Facebook | Paul Wallbank - Communications Professional

How much server space do Internet companies need to run their sites?

How much server space do companies like Google, Amazon, YouTube, Hotmail and Facebook need to run their sites?

“How much server space do companies like Google, Amazon, or YouTube, or for that matter Hotmail and Facebook need to run their sites?” is the question I’ve been asked to answer on ABC Radio National Drive this evening.

This isn’t a simple question to answer as the details of data storage are kept secret by most online services.

Figuring out how much data is saved in computer systems is a daunting task in itself and in 2011 scientists estimated there were 295 exabytes stored on the Internet, desktop hard drives, tape backup and other systems in 2007.

An exabyte is the equivalent of 50,000 years worth of DVD video, a typical new computer comes with a terabyte hard drive so one exabyte is the equivalent of a million new computers.

The numbers when looking at this topic are so great that petabytes are probably the best way of measuring data, a thousand of these make up an exabyte. A petabyte is the equivalent to filling up the hard drives of a thousand new computers.

Given cloud computing and data centres have grown exponentially since 2007, it’s possible that number has doubled in the last five years.

In 2009 it was reported Google was planning to have ten million servers and an exabyte of information. It’s almost certain that point has been passed, particularly given the volume of data being uploaded to YouTube which alone has 72 hours worth of video uploaded every minute.

Facebook is struggling with similar growth and it’s reported that the social media service is having to rewrite its database. Last year it was reported Facebook users were uploading six billion photos a month and at the time of the float on the US stock market the company claimed to have over a 100 petabytes of photos and video.

According to one of Microsoft’s blogs, Hotmail has over a billion mailboxes and “hundreds of petabytes of data”.

For Amazon details are harder to find, in June 2012 Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos announced their S3 cloud storage service was now hosting a billion ‘objects’. If we assume the ‘objects’ – which could be anything from a picture to a database running on Amazon’s service – have an average size of a megabyte then that’s a exabyte of storage.

The amount of storage is only one part of the equation, we have to be able to do something with the data we’ve collected so we also have to look at processing power. This comes down to the number of computer chips or CPUs – Central Processing Units – being used to crunch the information.

Probably the most impressive data cruncher of all is the Google search engine that processes phenomenal amounts of data every time somebody does a search on the web. Google have put together an infographic that illustrates how they manage to answer over a billion queries a day in an average time of less than quarter of a second.

Google is reported to own 2% of the world’s servers and they are very secretive about the numbers, estimates based on power usage in 2011 put the number of servers the company uses at around 900,000. Given Google invests about 2.5 billion US dollars a year on new data centres, it’s safe to say they have probably passed the one million mark.

How much electricity all of this equipment uses is a valid question. According to Jonathan Koomey of Stanford University, US data centres use around 2% of the nation’s power supply and globally these facilities use around 1.5%.

The numbers involved in answering the question of how much data is stored by web services are mind boggling and they are growing exponentially. One of the problems with researching a topic like this is how quickly the source data becomes outdated.

It’s easy to overlook the complexity and size of the technologies that run social media, cloud computing or web searches. Asking questions on how these services work is essential to understanding the things we now take for granted.

Chasing away the astroturfers

Recent court and industry regulator rulings are good news for honest businesses using social media.

Yesterday we heard the collective gnashing of teeth as social media experts, lawyers and business owners complained about the Australian Advertising Standards Board’s ruling that companies are responsible for comments on their Facebook pages.

The ASB ruling (PDF file) was a response to complaints that comments on Diageo’s Smirnoff Vodka page breached various industry codes of conducts and encouraged under age drinking.

While the board found the complaints weren’t justified – something that most of the hysterical commentators overlooked – the ruling contained one paragraph that upset the social media experts and delighted the lawyers.

The Board considered that the Facebook site of an advertiser is a marketing communication tool over which the advertiser has a reasonable degree of control and could be considered to draw the attention of a segment of the public to a product in a manner calculated to promote or oppose directly or indirectly that product. The Board determined that the provisions of the Code apply to an advertiser’s Facebook page. As a Facebook page can be used to engage with customers, the Board further considered that the Code applies to the content generated by the advertisers as well as material or comments posted by users or friends.

The key phrase in that paragraph is “over which the advertiser has a reasonable degree of control”. Obviously someone posting on Twitter, their blog or someone else’s website is beyond the control of the advertiser.

With Facebook comments, the onus is on businesses to make sure there is nothing illegal appearing on their streams and any misconceptions or false statements are answered.

In many ways, this is common sense. Do you, as a manager or business owner, want your brands tarnished by idiots posting offensive or illegal content? Sensible businesses have already been dealing with this by deleting the really obnoxious stuff and politely replying to the more outrageous claims by Facebook friends.

What’s more important with both the ASB ruling and the Allergy Pathways case the ruling relies upon make it clear that ‘astroturfing’ on social media sites won’t be tolerated.

Astroturfing is the PR practice of creating fake groups that appear to support a cause or product. A group paid for by an interested party appears to grow naturally out of community interest or concern – a fake grassroots group so to speak and hence the word ‘Astroturf’ which is a brand of artificial grass.

Organisations like property developers and mining companies have been setting up Facebook pages and websites that appear to be community groups supporting their projects and many smaller business have been inducing friends, relatives or contractors to post false testimonials. In the run up to major elections in 2012 and 13 we’re seeing many of these fake groups setup to push various political agendas.

For a few consulting groups, astroturfing has become a nice line of business and those of us on the fringe of the social media community have been watching the development of ‘online advocacy services’ with interest.

While no-one has claimed Allergy Pathways or Diageo were posting fake testimonials on their own Facebook pages, the rulings in both cases are a warning that the courts and regulators are prepared to deal with those getting clever with social media.

For honest businesses this ruling is a non-issue, it’s timely reminder though that web and social media site are not ‘set and forget’ but need to be regularly checked, valid customer comments replied to and inappropriate content removed.

The ASB ruling reaffirms what sensible social media experts have been advising all along, and that’s good news for them and their clients.

Verified Jerks

Anonymity is the problem on the Internet, accountability is.

When you work in customer service you quickly learn that some people are just rude jerks. Depending on how bad a day you have it could be 2, 5 or 10% of the population.

For these people the Internet has been a paradise with almost anonymous forums and newsgroups allowing them to be rude and obnoxious with little risk of being held accountable for their spiteful behaviour.

One of the hopes of social media services was that forcing people into using accounts tied to their real identities would impose some self discipline among these trolls and haters,

Sadly The argument that verified identities would stop people being irresponsible is wrong.

The sad story of seemingly mature people insulting and wanting to beat up a five year old participant on a reality TV show illustrates how manners, good taste and style are beyond some people.

It’s depressing, but unsurprising that this demographic can’t figure out that ‘reality’ TV shows are anything but real. The programs are carefully edited to suit the dramatic narrative of the producers with some of the participants being portrayed as villains and others as heroes.

The little girl in question could be in a spoilt little brat, but you’d want to be careful making that judgement from what you see on TV.

Many would put the spiteful behaviour of the Facebook commentors down to being another example of social media destroying our society, but this behaviour pre-dates the web.

In the 1990s we saw a similar wave of insults aimed at President Clinton’s then teenage daughter Chelsea. In many ways it was far worse in what we are seeing today in that those encouraging that behavior were the leaders of political parties and their ideological fellow travellers in the media.

The abuse of Chelsea Clinton marked the rapid decline of standards in politics that leaves many of us now sickened by the behaviour of all parties – and that of the media that treats their shenanigans seriously.

Notable about the raucous political partisanship is that most participant are happy, even proud, to be named as they debase the institutions they’ve been elected to represent.

The reason is they aren’t accountable, they know most of us are rusted on voters and the few that aren’t can be conned long enough by expensive advertising campaigns to get them elected.

Should they not get elected, they’ll be welcomed into the arms of their corporatist friends who will find them a nice sinecure on a board, committee or think tank.

The real reason people act like jerks is because they think they aren’t accountable – the politicians know they aren’t and most Facebook users figure the odds are in their favour that they’ll never be held to account for their boorish behaviour.

Anonymity is the reason for bad manners on the net, accountability is. While our society doesn’t make people accountable for cruel, rude or corrupt behaviour then these people will thrive. With or without the internet.

Facebook’s final fail

Has Facebook gone to far with its address changes

We’ve come to expect Facebook storing and manipulating our personal data, but is changing our contacts’ email addresses the final straw for the social media service?

Last week Facebook started changing users’ default email addresses to their inbuilt @facebook accounts.

This was irritating for many users, but now it appears the social media service has gone too far with changing the address books of their users.

If you have connected your iPhone, Android or Windows smartphone address books to the Facebook App, there is a chance that your contacts’ email addresses are now set to send to the user’s Facebook address rather than their “normal” email account.

When you synch your phone with your PC or laptop these changes will also be made in your main address book.

Given most people don’t use their Facebook supplied email this means many people won’t see messages sent to that address. This is a serious problem

You can check if your address book has been changed by simply looking at your contacts’ email addresses.

If it has, let your contacts know their addresses may have been changed as they can change the settings on their accounts. Read Write Web has instructions on fixing the address book problem.

Facebook’s behaviour on this is seriously worrying, it’s bad enough they store all of our data but altering our personal information is for me a bridge too far.

Given most mobile phone users would rather have their wallet stolen than lose their handset, Facebook’s messing with phones address book is going to shake their confidence in the service far more than the myriad privacy issues.

If the IPO was Facebook’s peak, it could well be this poorly thought out tactic that marks the beginning of the company’s decline.

Building the Internet’s Frankenstein monsters

Changing Internet empires give rise to strange alliances

Apple’s announcement of deep Facebook integration into their iOS6 operating system for the iPhone and iPad is the latest in the weird beasts created as the various online empires jostle for position in a changing marketplace.

We’re used to failing companies creating alliances – most notably Microsoft and Nokia in the mobile phone sector – and almost all of these ventures fail as they are akin to the two slowest runners in a race tying their legs together believing that will make them faster than the leader.

In other areas we see the big players buy out hot new businesses as the incumbents figure its easier to buy out the competition rather than try to compete.

While those purchases form the basis of the Silicon Valley greater fool model, usually the new business gets subsumed into the big corporation, the technology is lost and all but the most cynical founders wander off to do something more interesting.

Then there’s the merger of equals, and today’s announcement of Apple and Facebook’s deep co-operation is one of these.

Facebook has been talking about building its own phone – much to the scorn of industry participants – as the company struggles to deal with user moving onto mobile phones.

Apple is hopeless at social media, which is barely surprising from a company that employs its own secret police.

So the two coming together make sense although it may not work well as alliances like these can be likened like mating the world’s best golfer with a Grand Slam Tennis champion and expecting the child to be an Olympic swimmer.

Of course Apple had a successful merger of equals back in the early days of the iPhone – Google. The alliance worked well and, Google’s then CEO Eric Schmidt sat on Apple’s board for some time.

Than Google decided to develop its own mobile software build its own phones so relationships soured between Steve Jobs and Eric.

Now Google Maps has been ditched from the iOS phone system and steadily Google are finding their services being dropped from all of Apple’s products.

Those moveable alliances – not dissimilar to Eurasia, Eastasia and Oceania in George Orwell’s 1984 – are something we should get used to as the Big Four maneuver for position in the changing online world.

While it’s going to be tough time if you’re a mindless fanboi following the progeny of these strange alliances, for the rest of us it should be fascinating viewing.

Facebook’s Childrens Network

Do we need social media networks for children?

The Wall Street Journal reports that Facebook is developing a childrens network to overcome the problem of kids under 13 joining the service.

Underage kids getting on the network is a major problem for the social media service with last year’s Pew Social Media and Young Adult survey finding over half of US children logging onto these sites.

The rule of under 13s joining Facebook or other social media services isn’t one born out altruism – it was born out of the US COPPA law which was enacted at the end of the 1990s to protect young children from inappropriate advertising and data mining.

For Facebook and all the other social media data mining operations the inability to gather information on or advert to minors means they haven’t been interested in investing time or money in developing childrens’ networks.

As social networks become more critical to kids’ social lives, it’s not unexpected that younger children are going online just like their older brothers and sisters and this creates risks for services like Facebook.

To mitigate those risks, it was inevitable that Facebook would have to address the problem with setting up a service aimed at younger kids.

Where the challenge lies for Facebook and parents is encouraging kids to use the younger service. It’s going to have to be compelling for the youngsters to use it in preference to the adult network.

The key there is to get the critical mass of kids onto the service – social media platforms only succeed when users know their peers will be there.

So Facebook are probably going to have to offer most of the features of the main platform, without advertising or some of the more intrusive data mining and games.

It also won’t be possible to exclude adults from the kids network as parents and other relatives want to know what their offspring are doing and being friends with the younger ones is essential so they can see posts and other activity.

Age will also be an issue, it may well turn out that a kids network is more appropriate up to say 15 year olds rather than the current thirteen mandated by COPPA.

Overall, a Facebook Kids Network will be sensible move. The worry for Facebook is that kids might just decide there is more compelling place for their friends and interests.

Do you want to be the personal lubricant guy?

A reminder why you need to be careful with your Facebook likes.

Nick Bergas is a multimedia producer in Iowa City, but to Facebook he’s a live advertisement for personal lubricant.

As the New York Times reports, last Valentines Day Nick saw an Amazon listing for a 55 gallon drum of personal lubricant, ticked the product’s Facebook “Like” button and added a witty comment to his friends.

Shortly afterwards, Nick’s face started appearing in Facebook sponsored posts for big drums of personal lubricant.

Last year I wrote The Privacy Processors on how Facebook is using our personal data and Nick’s story is a good example of how every like, relationship or comment is potential fodder for Facebook’s marketing platform.

While Nick seems pretty chilled about his Facebook celebrity, for some it might not be so benign.

As we’ve seen for student teachers and others, an innocent or even funny posting may be a problem to those without perspective or a sense of humour.

For Facebook and other social media services, Nick’s story also illustrates a problem – that of “Garbage In, Garbage Out”.

While one of Facebook’s major assets is its huge user database, there’s no guarantee the data is accurate or useful.

Selling Nick’s details to a bulk medical lubricant wholesaler is pretty pointless, but that sort of intelligence is key to the future value of Facebook.

That much of the data gathered is the flaw at the heart of Facebook’s bid data aspirations and Google’s hopes to become an identity engine with Google+.

For us mere individuals, the lesson is we need to be a little bit careful about pressing those “like” buttons; explaining your affinity with bulk lubricants could be a bit tricky with your mum or partner.

Does Facebook’s float mark social media’s peak?

Is social media about to plunge into the trough of disillusionment?

After its successful float on Friday, social media giant Facebook’s stock is now 18% down on the IPO price and there are claims some investors were aware of revised analyst expectations shortly before shares went on sale.

Facebook’s share price isn’t being helped by large advertisers, most notably General Motors, publicly expressing their dissatisfaction.

In SmartCompany’s survey on business tech use, one statistic that stood out was that less than 30% of businesses were happy with their returns on social media.

Facebook can’t even win in the courts with a Californian magistrate throwing out the social media platform’s trademark case against a Norwegian pornography site.

It’s been clear for some time that the tech industry has been in an investment bubble and social media services have at been the centre of that hype .

The huge expectations of Facebook’s float value has been one of the drivers of Silicon Valley’s investment boom – a dangerous feedback loop in itself.

So now Facebook’s share price is in decline and angry investors are asking “why” and demanding answers from advisors and banks.

The real question though is does Facebook’s float mark the peak of the current tech boom in the same way AOL’s merger with Time Warner in January 2000 marked the peak of the original dot com mania?

One of the great similarities with the original dot com mania is the businesses’ failure to make money from their services – today’s Pintrest and Twitter have that much in common with the great Dot Com boom debacles of Pets.com and Boo.

The biggest problem with the social media services is most of them are advertising dependent. As we see from General Motors’ dissatisfaction and that of the businesses in the Smart Company survey, most businesses aren’t happy with the performance of social media platforms.

Getting the advertising, or other revenue streams, right is key to the survival of these services. Google cracked this after the original dot com boom and are now one of the most successful companies ever.

The companies that figure out the revenue models for social media, or online news, will be the next Google’s and Facebook could well be the business that cracks the code for social media.

For the social media industry overall, it appears the sector is now at what Gartner calls the “Peak of Inflated Expectations” on their hype cycle.

The next stage from the peak is the tumble into the “trough of disillusionment” and that appears to be where Facebook is heading.

As Gartner points out, that trough is also where good, stable businesses are built. While the sector or technology is scorned, those who survived the tumble out of fashion are able to consolidate and learn from the harsh lessons they’ve received.

Eventually the market rediscovers the technology or industry and eventually becomes accepted as a mature part of business or as Gartner put it, they enter the “plateau of productivity.”

This is exactly the process Amazon went through during the dark days of 2002 and 2003 after the tech wreck which today finds them as one of the Internet’s giants.

Whether Facebook can emulate Amazon or Google is for history to judge, but social media’s falling out of favour is not a bad thing, the wreckage of the current tech mania will see much stronger and viable social media businesses that will deliver real value to industry and society.

In the wreck of the dot com boom we saw HTML “coders” reduced from driving Porsches to driving buses, the same thing will probably happen to many of today’s social media experts. That in itself is not a bad thing.

Now Facebook’s challenges really begin

How can Facebook build their revenues to justify the huge market valuation.

The long awaited float yesterday of social media service Facebook was a triumph for the business’ founder Mark Zuckerberg, his management team and advisors.

A market valuation of 100 billion dollars for a business started less than ten years ago is an impressive achievement and that sum now presents massive challenges for management who have to deliver on what investors believe the service is capable of.

At US$38 a share, Facebook is valued at 76 times its projected 2012 earnings of 50 cents a share, and nearly twenty times its expected revenues of US$5 billion. This compares to Google which trades at less than 15 times its 2012 profit estimate and six times revenue.

For Facebook to match Google’s value, the social media service is going to have to start making serious money beyond they can from charging egoists and corporations $2 a time for featured posts.

Google’s success was in moving out of their walled garden, had Google focused on advertising just on their own search pages the company would be earning a fraction of the billions they now make every quarter.

It’s difficult to see how Facebook can move off their platform into other sites and with users moving to mobile, the company will find itself even more constrained by Google and Apple who want to control access to their devices.

A more obvious course for Facebook is to maximise income from the massive data base of likes, preferences, relationships and opinions they have amassed from their users. How they do this will probably be the biggest challenge to Facebook’s management.

In monetizing their database, Facebook will push the limits of the law, tolerance of privacy advocates and possibly the patience of their user base. This is going to test a company that has in the past been slow to respond to public concerns.

Another challenge is perception – with such a massive valuation, Facebook is going to attract critics regardless of what they do.

A good example of this is the number of people criticising the float for not ‘popping’ on the stock market debut. At the end of the first day’s trading the stock had only gone up 0.6% and some in the media claimed this showed the IPO wasn’t the successful.

The idea a successful IPO is one that soars on the first day of trading is a naive view from a 1980s mindset. The idea was born out of the privatisation of British and Australian utilities in the 1980s and 90s where taxpayers were seduced by the idea of “free money” in exchange for selling community assets cheaply.

A ‘stag profit’ from a share that soars on its public float is theft from the existing shareholders and a transfer of wealth to insiders and their advisors.

Silicon Valley venture capitalists and startup founders aren’t dumb and have never fallen for that trick – investors pay dearly for stock in their ventures.

While no-one would call Mark Zuckerberg and his management team dumb they have a big job ahead of them finding revenue sources to justify the $100 billion market valuation. It’s going to be an interesting ride.

Links of the day, 17 May 2012

The rise of Europe’s private internet police and how many friends can you buy on Facebook?

Foreign Policy magazine on The Rise of Europe’s Internet Police

Why a Japanese e-commerce giant is the lead investor in Pinterest.

Fast Company’s list of the most creative businesspeople in 2012.

Some interesting perspectives from the New York Times Magazine on Making Choices in the Age of Information Overload.

Buying friends on the Internet? $75 buys you a thousand on Facebook.

Join Facebook, get expelled

How can schools and parents deal with children wanting to get onto social media

Facebook is problematic for schools. On one hand it’s a great tools for kids to connect with their peers and relatives while it also can amplify problems for children who don’t have the emotional maturity to deal with online issues.

A common aspect of Facebook and many of the other social media services is that the minimum age for sign ups is thirteen years old and the consensus among online safety experts is children younger than that shouldn’t be encouraged to break the rules.

Given the issues involved with younger children using Facebook it’s not surprising that teachers and school principals try to discourage younger children from signing up.

One Queensland school principal has now ordered that any of her students breaching Facebook’s terms by signing up when under 13 will be expelled.

That’s pretty draconian although one can sympathise with the teachers, particularly given many parents allow children to sign up despite knowing they are breaking Facebook’s terms.

How the parents have reacted is interesting too, with online safety expert Susan McLean saying “”You could not print the response to the principal that some of the mothers wrote on Facebook”. None of this is surprising as some see their rights, and those of their children, as being paramount.

Facebook and other social media services are tough for parents as younger kids see their old siblings online and want to be there too. Given many teenagers build their social lives around the service, you can understand the pressure children put on mum and dad to sign them up.

As kids are going to eventually sign up to Facebook, and are probably already on services like Habbo Hotel or Club Penguin, they are going to have to deal with the issues all of us encounter online. So at least if parents are supervising usage, harm can be limited.

One area that seems to be misunderstood is why Facebook has a “no under 13s” policy. It isn’t, as child psychologist Dr Michael Carr-Gregg believes, because Facebook care about emotionally immature children, it is due to the US COPPA law.

COPPA – the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act – was passed in the late 1990s to prevent inappropriate data being collected on minors. For US based social media services it’s easier to exclude children rather than set up systems that comply with the law.

There’s many good reasons why children should be allowed to use online services, but respecting the terms of conditions of these sites is important too.

While expelling children from school may be taking things too far, it’s not good to be encouraging twelve year old kids to lie about their ages – they’ll be doing that soon enough in their late teens.