blog.dt.org

“We create 5 exabytes every two days.”

This quote comes to us courtesy of Google’s Eric Schmidt, who was offering his top 10 reasons why mobile is #1 in the following InformationWeek article:

http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=224400178

To paraphrase the context of this quote, all of the information created between the beginning of time and 2003 was about 5 EB, give or take (exabyte – 10¹⁸ bytes, or 1 Billion GB ). But today, according to him, “we” create 5 EB every 2 days, and it is not clear if this is the majestic plural “we”, as in Google, or “we” as in the entire world. But 5 EB is an awful lot of data (those drunken cat videos on YouTube are really starting to add up…).

Which brings me to my point: the signal-to-noise ratio of that 5 EB is probably low and getting lower every day. And I think we’re starting to get some hard data to prove it. For example, at Chirp, Twitter founder Biz Stone mentioned that Twitter has 105M+ registered users, with 300k new users each day, and 3B+ requests to their API each day. That is a lot of users and a lot of traffic. But how many of those users are active? 20%? 80%? According to the following article, 5% of those Twitter users are responsible for 75% of all traffic, with a rapid drop off in activity beyond 5%:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/twitters_most_active_users_bots_dogs_and_tila_tequila.php

If the premise of this article is true, then only about 20% of Twitter users are active in a measurable way. And the most active 5% are clogging the pipes with an enormous volume of Tweets — from which we might infer that the signal-to-noise ratio of those Tweets is not very high. Ask yourself this question: what percentage of Tweets that you see are relevant to you in any way? These numbers will only get worse, information-density-wise, as more people sign up for Twitter but otherwise don’t use it in a measurable (or relevant) way.

But back to the original quote. If Google is processing 5 EB of new data every two days, then they definitely need to keep building new data centers in the Columbia River gorge and elsewhere where power is inexpensive. But perhaps what they really need is better filtering technology to drop the 80% of that 5 EB that they don’t really need to keep. Maybe Google needs to keep 5 EB every 2 days to ensure that the 1 EB of good data buried within is not lost, but if they could separate the wheat from the chaff, then they could (1) build fewer data centers, which their investors would really like, and (2) deliver information to us with a much higher signal-to-noise ratio, which we would really, really like.

Google made a name for itself by making search results more relevant than any company that came before them; we can only hope that they (and Twitter, and Facebook, et al.) will continue to pursue information relevance with similar zeal as they process those 5 EB every two days. Otherwise, we should all plan for a whole lot more drunken cat videos.

“Go Screw Yourself, Apple.”

First, let me state for the record that I am currently an Adobe employee and that the opinions stated here are entirely my own and not in any way the official position of Adobe. And also let me state that the quote above is not from me (more on that later). And let me state that I am drinking beer right now. But I am also a hardcore developer, and I’m having a really, really hard time digesting the latest directives coming out of Cupertino. If I understand the new rules for the iPhone 4.0 SDK, I can only write code in C, C++, and Objective C if I intend to compile that code, using any compiler, into an executable that runs on an iPad or iPhone. What. The. F.?

Before I launch this rant into orbit, here is the link to the post that gives us that priceless quote:

http://theflashblog.com/?p=1888

Believe it or not, the quote is actually from an Adobe employee (not me) in a blog post. I’m sure the author got some immediate love from Adobe Legal, so I am going to attempt to avoid that situation and I will not comment directly on the situation involving the new iPhone 4.0 SDK rules, Flash, and CS5. Instead, I’m going to step back and ask the real question that should be on everyone’s minds:

“Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio Apple?”

Apple used to be the company that everyone loved. The underdog company in the 1990’s that fought the good fight against Microsoft and largely lost. The company that took on the music labels and finally, finally gave us a way to purchase and play digital music that made sense with the iPod and iTunes. The company that made laptops cool again with MacBooks and gave all of us hackers in the corporate world a way to use a non-Windows machine. The company that re-invented the smart phone with the iPhone and broke the wireless companies’ stranglehold on third-party applications on mobile devices with the AppStore. And, for better or worse, the company that gave us the iPad, which might just have a shot at initiating a paradigm shift for how we interface and use our personal computers.

But in the past year or two, Apple seems to have been tempted by the dark side of the force, and their response is looking more like Anakin than Luke. Which is another way to say that they are starting to look a lot like Microsoft in the 1990’s, a.k.a. the company that we all loved to hate. They launched the iPhone with Google’s CEO on stage, for crying out loud, but now they have a proxy suit against Google and Android via the lawsuit against HTC. The widespread complaints about iPhone app rejections, and the complete lack of transparency, and perceived capriciousness, of their criteria for acceptance. Their intransigent position about Flash and any technology that has the potential to bypass the AppStore business model. And now the latest rules, which dictate which languages are blessed for use when developing for the iPhone/iPad platform, with the severe implication that applications that were written in any other programming language — e.g. Java, or perhaps ActionScript — will be rejected from the AppStore.

Apple has built up a huge account balance of goodwill over the last decade, and they appear to have decided that it is time to empty that account. To be fair, Apple’s official statements seem to indicate that they believe that their inventions are being infringed (in the case of the HTC lawsuit); that they believe the AppStore requires a high bar for acceptance to maintain the quality of the experience on Apple devices; that they believe Flash is a security nightmare and CPU pigdog (to paraphrase some of the actual quotes that have been attributed to Apple’s CEO in the media); and that they believe that allowing people to compile their runtime interpreters into native applications is somehow an end-around move on their AppStore business model. But whichever side you take in these disputes, I think everyone has to accept that the tone of the conversation has irreversibly changed; with revenue comes arrogance, as they say in Silicon Valley (and probably everywhere else in the business world). The friendly days when Apple was a darling underdog and partner are gone forever, and we should get used to dealing with the 220 Billion Dollar Monster.

As a developer, I couldn’t be more turned off by a company that tells me which languages I can and can’t use. I want the freedom to choose the language that makes the most sense, or maybe seems the most fun to use, or maybe has the most available libraries for what I want to do, rather than being forced to live by someone else’s language laws. And I might just want to port some older code, rather than re-writing it from scratch in a “certified” language that is permitted by the device vendor. At the end of the day it is all object code running on the device, and the programming language that I used to capture my ideas before compiling it to object code isn’t really important. Unless you have a business model that you perceive to be at risk from certain programming languages, in which case it is very important…

So how does this end? I think it can only end badly for everyone. Some number of cool apps will never make it to certain devices under these rules. Some developers will be turned off and will leave this particular ecosystem for less-restrictive ones. And most importantly, all of the big companies will have their shields up and proton torpedoes armed and they will stop collaborating on the things that only big companies can do together. For example, remember how cool it was when the iPhone shipped with Google Maps and location awareness? Some might say that was revolutionary all by itself.

But I think this week was a very bad week for us all, because it clearly marks the end of any effective inter-corporate collaboration in the emerging mobile device universe.