The Age News

THERE'S A GOOD chance that you don't know anyone who's not on Facebook. After all, there are currently 800 million users on it. Projections based on historical data of its growth (it's been growing in a linear fashion) predict that it will hit 1 billion users by July 2012. That is roughly 1/7th of the entire world's population. Mind-boggling.

The website generates 770 billion pageviews per month, nearly as much as Matador. (Kidding.) Facebook isn't the only indication of where we are headed during the information age. New Android devices are being activated at the astonishing rate of 550,000 per day. And with the help of 300,000 new Twitter users per day, 250 million tweets are created every single day.

Have you heard of YouTube? Does it surprise you that 2 billion clips are watched every 24 hours? It surprised us. Try wrapping your head around this stat: 35 hours of video are uploaded to the website. Every minute.

A number that is sure to make postal workers anxious, if they're not already, is the fact that in 2010, 107 trillion emails were sent. Access to information is becoming exponentially more easy and more mobile: by 2014, more people will surf the web from their phones and tablets than from laptops and desktop computers combined.

What does this all mean? What does the future hold?