Two Signs of the Times

I found two articles today that really grabbed my interest, showing just how pervasive the Internet and social networking have become in our lives.

The first one was from Fast Company, entitled: Facebook, Google, Yahoo Join Forces To Fix The Internet's Biggest Problem In Decades.

Essentially, we're about out of IP addresses — the unique numbers that you use when you go online -- even though we have billions. Wikipedia defines an Internet Protocol address (IP address) as "a numerical label assigned to each device (e.g., computer, printer) participating in a computer network that uses the Internet Protocol for communication." Moving from the current standard, IPv4, to the newest standard, IPv6, increases the pool of number by trillions and trillions, because the address size will be increasing from 32 to 128 bits with the migration to the new standard.

The test, called World IPv6 Day, was today — Google, Facebook, and Yahoo got together to put into play a, as Fast Company said, "...24-hour test to weed out any bugs and accelerate adoption, which some are calling the biggest experiment in the history of the Internet." So far so good. :-)

The Internet Society has what looks to be a comprehensive list of participants -- 434 plus the big 3, plus network and hosting companies.
If everything goes smoothly, it'll be transparent to 99% of Internet users.

The second article that piqued my interest today was in the San Jose Mercury News, Facebook spreads emotions among friends. In a nutshell, a Facebook data scientist analyzed the Facebook postings of 1 million English speakers and their roughly 150 million friends, and found that positive words in posts drove more positive emotions in the friends' posts, and vice versa. The effect lasted for up to three days.

The 150 million friends of those 1 million analyzed makes sense, because according to Facebook, the average Facebook user has 130 friends. Now granted, due to the Facebook algorithms, you don't see every post for every friend, but if you log onto Facebook any given day, which 50 % of the 500 million active users do (also a Facebook statistic), you are going to be "catching" the mood of a good number of your Facebook friends.

Now I don't know about you, but there are a few of my Facebook "friends", whom I finally realized are toxic Facebook posters, and I've deleted their postings from my newsfeed. I got to the point where I just couldn't stand to read all of the complaining and moaning and ranting.  (Why don't I just unfriend those people? Good question. I'll think about that for another post, lol.)

I like to surround myself with positive people, both in real life and online. What about you?