The Law of Online Sharing

The idea of limitless growth gives sleepless nights to environmentalists, but not to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. He espouses a law of social sharing, which predicts that every year, for the foreseeable future, the amount of information you share on the Web will double. That rule of thumb can be visualized mathematically as a rapidly growing exponential curve. More simply, our online social lives are set to get significantly busier.

As for Facebook, more personal data means better ad targeting. If things work out, Zuckerberg's net worth will follow a similar trajectory to that described in his law of social sharing. That law is said to be mathematically derived from data inside Facebook. In ambition, it is closely modeled on Moore's Law, which was conceived by the computer-processor pioneer Gordon Moore in 1965 and has been at work in every advance in computing since. Also an exponential curve, it states that every two years twice as many transistors can be fitted onto a chip of any given area for the same price, allowing processing power to get cheaper and more capable.