Message From Michael 
November 17, 2010
THE GIANT GOOGLE FACEBOOK FACE-OFF
IN MY MIND I’M GOING TO CAROLINA
CURSE YOU, RED BARON
COCKTAIL CHATTER – 1 AND 2
THE GIANT GOOGLE FACEBOOK FACE-OFF: So, every techie from India to Indiana has written about Facebook’s’ new messaging system, and normally that means we don’t want to rehash old news on the Message, but this is just way too important to ignore. However, we will try and keep it brief and, maybe even, add a little perspective. For starters, even though it was called the “G-Mail killer” in its development stage, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg is careful to call it messaging, not e-mail. The Facebook system integrates private messages, text chats, all your SMS and, yes, e-mail, in one place, with the history of all your communication. What G-Mail calls message threads. And, oh, yes, there is no subject line in the communication. The ‘subject’ is the conversation. Yeah, I’m still trying to wrap my brain around that one. Anyway, some numbers: As we all know, Facebook has more than 500 Million users. Google’s G-Mail has 170 Million users. And MySpace (remember them?) has 140 Million users. Lost in the Facebook announcement brouhaha is AOL’s announcement that it has upgraded its messaging service (notice, not just e-mail) to integrate all your e-mail from all your accounts into one, with the addition of multi-media. The last numbers I could find for AOL e-mail users was 37 Million. It should also be noted that Google did try something similar, bringing all of the email, messaging, documents, etc., under one umbrella. It was called Google Wave and it crashed onto the shore of reality. In the same reality vein, it should be noted that Gartner Research says social networking is rapidly overtaking e-mail as the number one activity on the Internet. Of course, Facebook says its new messaging system is sort of a social networking-messaging kind of thing. A background note on this rivalry between the two Internet giants. Not long before the Facebook announcement, Google started blocking other services from importing email contact info, unless it was reciprocal. At this point, Facebook is introducing its new messaging service through invitation. And, yes, I have filed an invitation request.
IN MY MIND I’M GOING TO CAROLINA: Apparently Google and Facebook agree on something – James Taylor’s love of Carolina. Both companies (along with Apple) have built, or are building, massive data centers in western North Carolina. The key word in all this is – massive. Facebook reports that it gets more than 100 Million new photos every day and ‘shares’ more than 30 Billion pieces of content every month. Google-owned YouTube reports that it gets a staggering 35 HOURS of video uploaded every MINUTE. As a report in Marketing Vox noted, that’s the equivalent of 176-thousand full-length Hollywood releases every week. Or put in even more startling terms, if the three major broadcast networks broadcast 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year every year for the last 60 years, they still wouldn’t have broadcast as much content as is uploaded to YouTube every month. (You have to love that factoid.) As Media Post writer-reporter Erik Sass (who is one of the few online writers worth following) notes, the sheer size of the Facebook facility is testimony to the impact of social media. Facebook’s two facilities will cover more than 607-thousand square feet. Overall, he reports, the number of servers in the U.S. has increased from 2.6 Million in 1997, to 5.6 Million in 2003, to 11.8 Million in 2007, to 17 Million in 2009. Do you see a pattern there? Another great factoid: All the data centers in the U.S.A. consume more than 5,000 Megawatts of power every year at a cost of $18.5 Billion – “enough to power five million homes, the same amount consumed by the state of Mississippi.”
Further Factoids: YouTube has crossed the Rubicon of online subscriptions – One Billion, according to a blog post by its marketing manager George Haddad. As reported by WebPro News, the channel that took YouTube over the Billion mark was MachinimaSports which, when I checked it, only gets a few thousand views per video, but apparently has a lot of sports videos. The WebPro News report noted that there are actually 15 sites that have more than a Million subscribers, including some that you may be familiar with from previous Messages (realannoyingorange, fred, smosh, collegehumor, failblog) and some you may not (nigahiga, kassemg, sxephil, kevjumba.) Meanwhile, comScore’s VideoMetrix report says that all Google sites (which is mainly YouTube) scored more than Two Billion video views and more than 146 Billion unique visitors last month. Yahoo took second place with 233 Million views and nearly 54 Million viewers, followed by Viacom Digital (176 Million views and 53 Million viewers); relative newcomer Vevo (236 Million views and 47 Million viewers); and then Facebook (162 Million views and 47 Million viewers.)
CURSE YOU, RED BARON: Apparently Snoopy wouldn’t fit in today’s modern media world with his circumscribed lamentations about his fearless foe. The Parents Television Council says that the use of profanities has increased by two thirds (69.3%) in the last five years, but even more troubling, they say, is the type of profanity used which they describe as ‘harsher.’ In a report with the overly-cutesy title of “habitat for profanity,” the council calls the ruling earlier this year by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals on ‘fleeting expletives’ a “castration (their word) of the FCC’s powers of enforcement.” Interestingly, the report says the worst offender was the plaintiff in the case – Fox where the use of profanity nearly tripled (269% to 292%) in the five year period. The other networks were dramatically lower. The report says the biggest increase in the use of profanities came in the so-called ‘family hour’ of 8 p.m., followed by 9 p.m. For example, the report says instances of the F-word being used but bleeped in the 8 p.m. hour increases 1,010%, from 10 in 2005 to 111 in 2010. Use of euphemisms for the F-word increased 160%, from 5 in 2005 to 13 in 2010. In the 9 p.m. hour, use of the bleeped F-word jumped 15,500%, from just once, according to the report, in 2005 to 156 times in 2010. Euphemisms for the word in 9 p.m. only increased 10% from 10 in 2005 to 11 in 2010.
COCKTAIL CHATTER #1: China recently announced that its Supercomputer, the Tianhe 1, is the world’s fastest, but MIT’s Technology Review says that is only technically true. Let me see if I can explain this. You see, in tech talk, computer speed is measured in FLOPS (Floating point OPerations per Second) – what you and I would call…. Calculations. The Tianhe 1 achieved the incredible speed of 2.57 petaflops. A peta is 10 to the 15th power. Or put in simpler terms – more than a Quadrillion calculations a second. The Tech Review article says that while the Chinese computer can reach that speed, it can’t sustain that speed because of the kind of processors and graphics it uses. And that is why it’s only technically correct. On top of that, a group of scientists who maintain a website tracking the world’s fastest supercomputers says there are five other supercomputers coming online in the upcoming year that will beat the Tianhe 1, including ones at the University of Illinois and at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. Yes, there really is a site that just tracks the world’s supercomputers. It’s unimaginatively called top500.org. On the other end of the technology scale, there really is a website called Treehugger, and it reports that a firm in Austria has built the world’s tallest office building of… wood. The 30-story high-rise tower in Dornbin does have a skeleton post and beam construction including timber and concrete, but the rest is a laminated wood product.
COCKTAIL CHATTER #2: The longest running comedy in television history is getting longer. Fox has renewed The Simpsons for a 23rd season, which you probably already know, but the reason it’s in cocktail chatter is that one television observer noted that the extension means that Bart Simpson will be 33 years old… technically speaking. And more from the MIPCOM “global entertainment content industry” conference which attracted 12,400 people from 100 countries. Russia’s Red Media Group has acquired the Food Networks’ Fresh with Anna Olson and Cinemax’s Forbidden Science, which for those unfamiliar with it (like me) is about “a world in which people fulfill erotic desires with androids.” Russia’s First HDTV picked up Motorhead Traveler in which a guy travels around the world; MxCulture, a ‘behind the scenes’ look at the sport of Motocross; and Sledsense, a snowmobile sports adventure show. The MIPCOM summary report noted that a lot of the focus was on emerging markets. For example, Cineflex International reported business “from China to Chile” for its Nazi hunter series. Lastly, on the television front, a San Diego County Superior Court judge, DeAnn Salcido, who ran what was described as a “colorful courtroom” apparently in hopes of becoming a judge on a reality TV show, has resigned after a judicial panel cited 39 instances of misconduct on the bench.
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