Ines post on the recent Facebook controversy on its Terms of Use got me thinking. Will Facebook be burdened by its user data 50+ years from now? Storage space, of course, keeps on growing, making it possible to store more data per server--or whatever we might call a place to store digital data 40 years from now-- nevertheless, server farms are a major cost factor for social networking companies. Facebook is no exemption. Just in May 2008 Facebook raised $ 100 million to buy 50.000 additional servers. A recent note on Facebook's engineering blog underlines the immense data growth that is happening everyday day:

- 2-3 Terabytes of photos are being uploaded to the site every day (more than 700 Mio photos uploaded monthly)
- FB has over one petabyte of photo storage
- Some more stats: here

Using the latest statistics provided by Facebook (FB)...

- FB has 175 million users (currently current growth: 600.000 users per day)
- the fastes growing demographic is 30+ years old

...lets assume the following
- 2009-2023 (600.000 users a day, 300 days a year)
- 2024-2038 (300.000 users a day , 300 days a year)
- 2038-2060 (100.000 user a days, 300 days a year)
- Users might not always be new users, but users who reregister with a different eMail and the like
- FB does not change its ToU so that only a minority of profiles gets deleted
- one user profile needs at least 1 MB of space
- 2.5 terrabyte of content is uploaded at 300 days a year (I slightly altered the number of people doing uploads)

By end of 2060 FB would have gathered:
- approx. 5.5 billion user profiles (5.2 Petabytes of profile data)
- approx. 19.5 Petabytes of content
- Total of 25-30 Petabytes of data

By 2060 FB's formerly young generation would be old. What would happen to the data? (Virtual)immortality at last? Would FB need to put a lot of effort into maintaining the data? No one can tell whether FB will exist 50 years from now. The above numbers are based on rough/quick assumptions and could certainly be calculated in a more accurate way. However, my goal was to offer food for thought for our readers out there. On that end I am looking forward to your comments or more precise calculations.