Watch the Internet Happen, One Second at a Time

You’ve probably heard this before, but it doesn’t cease to amaze: 3 billion Google searches are performed each day and 204 million emails are sent per minute. Each day, 2.7 billion likes are sent on Facebook and 174 million messages are tweeted. Two new users join LinkedIn every second, 72 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube, and 700 YouTube videos are shared over Twitter every minute.

Hearing these stats about how much information is shared over the internet can be both shocking and humbling, but it can be difficult to process how large these numbers really are. But what if we could watch this information as it’s shared in real time?

One Second is a Web project that can help us gain perspective on the amount of sharing going down across the Web. The site visualizes everything that happens each second on the internet through simple charts. Want to know how many “Likes” Facebook posts receive each second? In a grid, One Second prints one Facebook logo for each “Like.” Curious as to how many YouTube videos are viewed in one second? Count the number of YouTube icons in One Second’s grid. To demonstrate the way we information shared over the internet piles up, One Second also times the number of seconds you spend on the site and updates the information on its site accordingly. Here’s an example from the top of the Dropbox chart:

Scroll through the page’s interactive one-page layout and watch data being shared on the internet one second at a time.

It can be difficult to catch the hard numbers from the site (the information changes every second, after all), so here is the data in a more static state. Each second on the internet,

• 197 Reddit votes are cast
• 463 Instagram photos are uploaded
• 833 Tumblr posts are published
• 1,024 Skype calls are made
• 3,935 messages are tweeted
• 11,574 files are uploaded to Dropbox
• 33,333 Google searches are performed
• 46,333 videos are viewed on YouTube
• 52,083 posts are liked on Facebook
• 1.67 million e-mails are sent

That’s right, 1.67 million emails are sent each second! Wow.

At the bottom of the page, One Second points out that the rate of information sharing taking place has been an explosion in the data realm. Some of the networks collecting and processing vast amounts of information today are actually some of the youngest; 10 years ago Skype, Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, Twitter, Tumblr, Dropbox, and Instagram didn’t exist. In fact, just 20 years ago only 130 websites existed, and Google wasn’t one of them. Back then you had to pay for an email account through an Internet Service Provider! And what about 30 years ago? There was no such thing as the internet back then.

 
What information from One Second do you find most shocking? Share with us in the comments section!
via CNET