Imagine the pride felt by riders of the ‘Pony Express,’ an American enterprise carrying mail across the Great Plains. How long can you wait for information today? The Internet, allowing instant access to a wide range of information, services, and products, makes the young riders and studs seem like elders with hip problems climbing stairs.
The average speed of US Internet to date is 7.6 megabytes per second, about 130 times faster than the earliest versions of digital information transfers in 1984. We can never go back, and only push forward regarding increased Internet ‘horse power.’
Consider (just) one minute of online behavior:
- 700 videos are uploaded
- 28,000 Tumblr posts are issued
- 100,000 Twitter ‘tweets’ are released
- 34,000 Facebook ‘likes’ are expressed
Online behavior is expected to quadruple by 2014! In 1998, the Web hosted 50 million users with 25 million hosting services. Today, 41% of the global population enjoys Internet connection, with users surfing across more than 630 million websites.
In 1998, Google, among the world’s most-used search engines, experienced under 10,000 searches per day. Today, 3 billion searches are performed over a 24-hour period. In 2001, 31 billion emails were sent per day; now, 297 billion digital messages trollop across the Internet.
The Internet changed and accelerated the timeframe of sent and sought information; additionally, the modern-day landscape influences how we seek it, with 6.8 billion hosting mobile phone subscriptions in 2013 (compared to 1.3 billion only one year prior).
There’s a big difference in ‘horse power’ regarding information dissemination between then and now. How much power can we eventually fit under the digital hood of the Internet?
(Infographic courstesy of: http://www.whoishostingthis.com/blog/)
Click the Infographic to enlarge it in a new window.
