Sabyasachi Roy
On this March 12 CERN celebrated thirtieth anniversary of World Wide Web. Three decades back, in March 1989, Tim Berners-Lee submitted a proposal for an information management system to his boss, Mike Sendall at the world’s largest physics laboratory CERN at Geneva.
‘Suppose all the information stored on computers everywhere were linked. Suppose I could program my computer to create a space in which everything could be linked to everything’ – was his idea. ‘Vague, but exciting’ were the words that Sendall wrote on the proposal. But Sendall managed to give Tim scope to work on it at CERN and Tim began work using a NeXT computer, one of the Steve Jobs’ early products. By October of 1990, Tim had written the three fundamental terminologies (which presently appear on web browser) – HTML, URI (URL) and HTTP. The approach came out to be path-breaking which in return founded the rudiment for development of the present-day quintessential information superhighway – the World Wide Web.
At that time one more very pertinent outlook put forward by Tim. He proposed that the underlying code should be made available on a royalty-free basis. Tim realised that it’s true potential would only be unleashed if anyone, anywhere could use it without paying a fee or having to ask for permission. CERN agreed to this proposal and announced the universality of this global connectivity platform in April 1993. In 1994 an international community named World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was founded with the aim to develop open web standards.
However, the technology is so prolific and vast that it is impossible to credit the invention of the Internet to a single person. And, in the past three decades, the technology has penetrated (or should I say invaded!) every walk of our life so much so that the World seems to be running by the instructions under the click of a mouse.
Data growth has been immense in the past few years and it is growing faster than ever. As a matter of fact, 90% of internet data has been created in the last 2 years. Today, the Internet hosts close to 2 billion active websites. There are 4.2 billion active users that are connected to the Internet all the time via 50 billion connected devices.
Here are some daily numbers according to Internet Live Statistics:
- 4+ billion active users
- 2.5 quintillion bytes are created in a day.
- 223 million emails sent (the majority of them are spam emails)
- 5.5 billion Google searches
- 5.9 billion videos viewed on YouTube
- 69 million photos uploaded to Instagram
- 272 million Skype calls
- 100,900 websites hacked
- 5,053,000,000 GB Internet traffic
- 3,410,500 MWh electricity used
- 2,879,800 tons of CO2 emissions
So, how much data do we generate daily? The amount of data we produce every day is truly mind-boggling. According to an IBM there are 2.5 quintillion bytes of data created each day at our current pace. Based on current trends, the data size is expected to grow 40-times by the year 2020. According to MarTech, the total data size of the Internet is 2.7 Zettabytes until 2017. The data size is expected to grow to 44 Zettabytes by 2020 based on an article published on Forbes in 2015. Over the last two years alone 90 percent of the data in the world was generated. So, data has grown so much that it would not be surprising if total data size passes 50 ZB by 2020.
With so much information at our fingertips, we’re still adding to the data stockpile every time we turn to our search engines for information. Our current love affair with social media certainly fuels data creation. With billions of active users, Facebook is still the largest social media platform, not to mention about others like Twitter, Snapchat, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram and of course Gmail.
Here are a few interesting data.
- We conduct more than half of our web searches from a mobile phone now.
- More than 3.7 billion humans use the internet (that’s a growth rate of 7.5 percent over 2016).
- On average, Google now processes more than 40,000 searches EVERY second (3.5 billion searches per day)!
- 1.5 billion people are active on Facebook daily. There are five new Facebook profiles created every second! More than 300 million photos get uploaded per day.
- There are 600 million Instagrammers; 400 million who are active every day. Each day 95 million photos and videos are shared on Instagram.
Here are some incredible statistics for the volume of communication we send out every minute:
- We send 16 million text messages
- There are 990,000 Tinder swipes
- 15,000 GIFs are sent via Facebook messenger
- Every minute there are 103,447,520 spam emails sent
- There are 154,200 calls on Skype
These social media platforms are growing at enormous rate adding more and more data to world wide web. In addition, the statistics on data usage coming out of businesses and service providers in our new platform-driven economy can not to be ignored. Not the least, the latest addition to this world wide web is the ‘Internet of Things (IOT)’ which connects ‘smart’ devices that interact with each other and also with we human beings while collecting all kinds of data.
With enormous expansion of internet, there is also problems in handling the data and meeting the demand of uninterrupted internet service. High-speed Internet is the electricity of the 21st century, but much of the planet remains in the unconnected zone yet; only about 2.7 billion human beings are wired. With the aim to meet the demand of highspeed wireless internet service, very recently Google has launched the Project Loon which would bring the Internet to a huge portion of unconnected humanity via thousands of solar-powered, high-pressure balloons floating some 60,000 feet above the Earth. It may be Google’s strategic interest to get more people online, still the project has fetched high attraction from the internet-community for it’s innovative and all-pervading strategy. Project Loon balloons would circle the globe in rings, connecting wirelessly to the Internet via a handful of ground stations each of which would act as a wireless station for a reasonable area of coverage.
In fine, the world wide web, and the data involved therein, is growing at such an ever-increasing rate that our world is becoming not only digitized buy ‘datafied’.