Earth is....connected

When I started school, we had those old Victorian style wooden desks with the lift-up lids and holes for ink wells – I’m not kidding. It wasn’t long after that it was out with the old and in with the new (plastic) and progress was being made. Another thing that we didn’t have when I started school was computers. Sure, we had an old Atari at home and a BBC Micro machine, but IT wasn’t being taught at school until I got to secondary school (12 – 18). When I got to University, we were all still on dial-up connections that would work on the odd occasion that it felt like it and the most you could do was check your email.

When I finally got to work I experienced the wonder of high-speed Internet and proper email, but still the majority of our communication was done through fax and phone. So, when I saw this new video from Facebook today, It really made me stop and think how fair we’ve come in such as short space of time, after all, I am still relatively young….cough….

The video features a program that actually visualizes the activity taking place on the Facebook network including everything from status updates, friend requests, pokes, posted links and so on. Named Project Palantir, the program displays the activity on a 3D globe complete with a sun and was developed at Facebook Hackathon XI by a Facebook engineer.

MyTake – What a thing of beauty, to be able to see something like that demonstrates how connected we are all. Go back to 2000 and remember how worried we were about the Y2K bug, or accessing the net using dial-up and now think of this, eight short years and we can map the connected state of the world through a social network. Brilliant