How Big Is Your Byte: Twitter, Facebook And More In Bytes

As our world gets more and more complex, we tend to transfer that to the virtual world of ones and zeros.  As we clear up more space in the real world, the complexity of the things we virtualize becomes ever greater in size.  A great example of this are all the photos that millions of us take each and every day of our lives.  With the digital camera comes an ever growing number of photos being uploaded, and for each day that goes by, the resolution of those photos becomes ever greater.  So as you can imagine, the storage space needed to fill up everything that we create each day is skyrocketing to levels where we are soon going to be talking about terabytes, zettabytes and even exabytes.

But how can you make sense of all this data, and how big is a byte really in today’s society?  A byte is still as big as it was when it was created, but the information that can be stored in it has somewhat changed.  Sure, it can still store the same amount of zeros and ones, but it’s what those can store in today’s data that is interesting here.

Rackspace tried to make sense of all this and decided to create a really great infographic about it.  There are things in here that might surprise you and there are things in here that you won’t be able to comprehend.  The cool thing is really that when the data is stored, all you care about really is how much space is left for you to store some more.  Am I right?