Monday, February 11, 2013

Scaling to capacity

Remember that time you got a new computer and figured you'd never ever ever be able to fill up that 100gig hard drive? Or back when the internet was slow and you finally got DSL and figured it'd be lightning fast forever? And then again when you got cable internet and now it really should rock?

And then you started storing pictures in ever-growing formats. 10 years ago a typical jpg image was 50 kilobytes, now my wife sends me pics over a megabyte over the phone ... and for the most part, there's no additional information in there. We started storing movies on our hard drives instead of burning them to CD. We bloated websites with more and more visual doodads. News providers upload more and more of their content in video form (rather than the far more convenient and faster-to-download text). In other words, increased capacity opened up the question "how else can I use more of it?", or alternatively, the idea that "who cares!"

Take a look at your Facebook feed. When someone wants to convey an idea, they no longer just post words. They post a picture of the words. Pretty soon we'll have a site that automatically makes a picture with the words (and optionally falsely attributes them to a famous person), then posts that on our behalf. Have we really improved our experience? Or is the world just turning into MySpace?

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