The big data heads were swimming in nirvana this week during Strataconf in New York.  I dipped in and out of sessions when I could (time differences and headphones being the normal issues).

One talk for the social media experts was from Hilary Mason from bit.ly who presented “What Data Tells Us”

One of the interesting points was the half life of a link to content when it’s posted on social media, the bit.ly team calculated their links have a half life of 2.8 hours.  Not a lot but when you think of the volume of data is generated by social media it actually makes sense.

So there’s a few questions that it raises in my mind:

• As more content is produced how the with this time period decrease? At what point will the half life of a link be an hour for example?
• Where’s the peak? At what point will content creators reach a plateau of content creation?
• What’s the life of a status post? If links are currently 2.8 hours, what’s the half life of a status update?