The Half Life of Online Info and Services
June 15, 2009
You have a chunk of radioactive material. With each tick of a clock, the chunk loses some of its radioactivity. Some chunks are dead in the blink of an eye (less if you are unlucky enough to have the wrong chunk around for a second or two) or maybe centuries. The idea is that the chunk goes dead. Those who worry about radioactive decay think in terms of half life; that is, how long for the chunk to lose half its punch.
I am working on a new study which should be wrapped up before the end of summer. One idea I have been exploring is the half life of online information. Time is important to value and time is expensive to manage. The cost of some computer systems is gated by one’s definition of “acceptable time”. An example is an index refresh. It’s cheaper to update an index once a month via a batch process than deal with Twitter’s Tweets in near real time.
I enjoyed “MySpace Problems May Spread to Facebook, Twitter” by Anthony Massucci. He has hit on one of my study’s findings, and this gives me an opportunity to comment, following my no news policy for this free Web log. He began the story with the key idea:
As Facebook and Twitter watch what’s happening at MySpace, they should be worried and heed the warning of potential problems to come. Social-networking sites grow like weeds and, well, die like weeds too.
Yep, dead on. He continued:
As exciting as it must be for these executives to be working at these companies as they grow quickly, there’s cause for concern. Grow too fast and the costs can’t be contained. Grow slowly and you are in danger of becoming irrelevant. Take a buyout and you likely lose control. Decline buyout attempts and take the risk that there won’t be enough money or revenue to help sustain future demands.
Well said. Let me add several observations:
- The decreasing half life has significant implications for investors, users, and technology companies. The reward for fielding a success is not going to be sustainable. In effect, the rapid degradation releases more particles that can be recombined or can, acting in unexpected ways, kill other things, probably companies in adjacent businesses. Like a radiation victim, the illness looks like one thing, but it quite another. A diagnose and remedy are often tough to deliver in the time the victim has left. Scary thought in today’s lousy financial climate.
- The recombination of particles such as programming languages, methods, and user needs can produce one of those artificially fertile Petri dishes that puzzle first year biology students. if something wild and crazy emerges, that could overrun one’s lab mate’s Petri dish, spoiling a well planned, predictable exercise book project. Wasted time for sure.
- The ecosystem in which rapid decay takes place may be altered and quickly. Mt Etna goes boom and lots of changes took place quickly. Lots of scrambling obviously. Disruptive. Maybe that’s not a sufficiently strong word.
Just my opinion. The half life is a big deal in electronic information. More on this topic in my new study. “Wave” at the parade of innovations. Then pick the right “wave” to surf.
Stephen Arnold, June 15, 2009
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One Response to “The Half Life of Online Info and Services”
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Great idea. One of the ways we segment the information and media market is precisely by this variable: content shelf life. While a given tweet may have an implicit sell-by date of a few hours, some scientific journal articles are still going strong twenty year or more after publication. Ditto for history textbooks.
This post may offer up some ideas to help your thinking: http://marklogic.blogspot.com/2009/05/publishing-content-reusability-chart.html