Definition of big data, characteristics of big data

Have you ever seen one of the videos on Facebook that shows a “flashback” of posts, likes, or
images—like the ones you might see on your birthday or on the anniversary of becoming friends
with someone? If so, you have seen examples of how Facebook uses Big Data.

A report from McKinsey & Co. started that by 2009, companies with more than 1,000 employees
already had more than 200 terabytes of data of their customer’s lives stored. Consider adding that
startling amount of stored data to the rapid growth of data provided to social media platforms
since then. There are trillions of tweets, billions of Facebook likes, and other social media sites
like Snapchat, Instagram, and Pinterest are only adding to this social media data deluge.

The Facebook Context

Arguably the world’s most popular social media network with more than two billion monthly
active users worldwide, Facebook stores enormous amounts of user data, making it a massive
data wonderland. It’s estimated that there will be more than 183 million Facebook users in the
United States alone by October 2019. Facebook is still under the top 100 public companies in the
world, with a market value of approximately $475 billion.

Every day, we feed Facebook’s data beast with mounds of information. Every 60 seconds,
136,000 photos are uploaded, 510,000 comments are posted, and 293,000 status updates are
posted. That is a LOT of data.

At first, this information may not seem to mean very much. But with data like this, Facebook
knows who our friends are, what we look like, where we are, what we are doing, our likes, our
dislikes, and so much more. Some researchers even say Facebook has enough data to know us
better than our therapists!

Apart from Google, Facebook is probably the only company that possesses this high level of
detailed customer information. The more users who use Facebook, the more information they
amass. Heavily investing in its ability to collect, store, and analyze data, Facebook does not stop
there. Apart from analyzing user data, Facebook has other ways of determining user behavior.

1. Tracking cookies

2. Facial recognition

3. Tag suggestions

4. Analyzing the Likes

Facebook Inc. analytics chief Ken Rudin says, “Big Data is crucial to the company’s very
being.” He goes on to say that, “Facebook relies on a massive installation of Hadoop, a
highly scalable open-source framework that uses clusters of low-cost servers to solve
problems. Facebook even designs its hardware for this purpose. Hadoop is just one of
many Big Data technologies employed at Facebook.”

Examples

Here are a few examples that show how Facebook uses its Big Data.

Example 1: The Flashback

Honoring its 10th anniversary, Facebook offered its users the option of viewing and sharing a
video that traces the course of their social network activity from the date of registration until the
present. Called the “Flashback,” this video is a collection of photos and posts that received the
most comments and likes and set to nostalgic background music.

Other videos have been created since then, including those you can view and share in celebrating
a “Friendversary,” the anniversary of two people becoming friends on Facebook. You’ll also be
able to see a special video on your birthday.

Example 2: Celebrate Pride

Following the Supreme Court’s judgment on same-sex marriage as a Constitutional right,

Facebook turned into a drenched rainbow spectacle called “Celebrate Pride,” a way of showing
support for marriage equality. Facebook provided an easy, simple way to transform profile
pictures into rainbow-colored ones. Celebrations such as these hadn’t been seen since 2013
when 3 million people updated their profile pictures to the red equals sign (the logo of the
Human Rights Campaign).
Within the first few hours of availability, more than a million users had changed their profile
pictures, according to the spokesperson for Facebook, William Nevius. All this excitement also
raised questions about what kind of research Facebook was conducting after their tracking user
moods and citing behavior research. When the company published a paper, The Diffusion of
Support in an Online Social Movement, two data scientists at Facebook had analyzed the factors
which predicted the support for marriage equality on Facebook. Factors that contributed to a user
changing profile pictures to the red sign were looked at.

Example 3: Topic Data and Example 4: I voted

Topic Data is a Facebook technology that displays to marketers the responses of the audience
about brands, events, activities, and subjects in a way that keeps their personal information
private. Marketers use the information from topic data to selectively change the way they market
on the platform as well as other channels.
This data was previously available through third parties but was not as useful because the sample
size was too small to be significant, and the determination of demographics was almost
impossible. With Topic Data, Facebook has grouped the data and stripped personal information
for user activity to help marketers by offering insights on all the possible activities related to a
specific topic. This gives marketers an actionable and comprehensive view of their audience for
the first time

Also Read: Data Science vs. Big Data vs. Data Analytics