Social media

The internet revolution was followed by yet another technology paradigm – social media. While the internet was about connecting people and sharing information, the information that was available to be utilized was still limited (relatively).

Social media created interactions, blogging, and micro-blogging opportunities, leading to a data explosion.

Figure 2: Social media applications

As social media took the world by storm, there were a few key developments with big technology firms. Facebook spotted early winners in Instagram and WhatsApp. While Instagram was a steal at $1 billion, the acquisition of WhatsApp at $19 billion did raise some eyebrows. The size of the market that these applications were addressing, however, justified the cost. Also, by the time WhatsApp was acquired in 2014, Facebook's revenue in advertisements alone was about $12 billion, and the user base was at 1.3 billion people.

Despite the success of Facebook's revenue model, they were clear that they had to expand their user base globally. Their ambition was to have every internet user as a customer, and where internet penetration was poor, they even strategized ways to provide the internet. The race for user data was on, and as they offered their services free, their users were their commodity.

Let us touch upon the size of the market and the amount of data created using these social media applications. This will help us understand why the emerging technologies that are covered in this chapter are relevant now more than ever before. These numbers will shed light on why the big technology firms were focusing on growing their customer base.

Some numbers to note are (as of January 2019):

• 4.2 billion people use the internet
• 3.4 billion people actively use social media
• Facebook and WhatsApp create 60 billion messages a day
• 45 billion WeChat messages were sent in 2018
• 46 TB of data is consumed on WeChat during 1 minute of the morning rush hour
• Google has answered 450 billion unique queries since 2003
• 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute

You can clearly see the monstrous growth of data in the world based on the preceding statistics. Much of this growth has been driven by the widespread adoption of social media by users across the world.

"There were 5 exabytes of information created by the entire world between the dawn of civilization and 2003. Now that same amount is created every two days."

– Eric Schmidt, Ex-CEO and Chairman of Google in 2010

This data has been used by the tech-giants over the years for various commercial purposes. This has also led to a backlash from governments, regulators, and even customers on data privacy rights. The scandal where Facebook shared data on 87 Million people with Cambridge Analytica created a lot of reputational issues for the firm and highlighted the need for better data controls and regulations. The tag #FacebookIsDead started trending, and many millennials and Generation Z users moved away from the social media giant due to their treatment of user data. It was clear that data regulations, governance, and controls were mandatory. But before moving on to that, let us first look at how firms managed this big explosion of data using big data technologies.