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The expansion of numbers

01 Aug 2010 on Learning

There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it’s only a hundred billion. It’s less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers. ~ Richard Feynman

It used to be that only astronomical numbers were huge. The financial number have caught up and now we do see number in trillions. And not surprisingly, the internet number are also catching up in millions and billions

iTunes had 1 billion apps downloaded last year. Just recently, all in the month of July 2010,  Foursquare had 100 million check-ins, Wordpress had 100 million plugin downloads, Netflix had 15 million users and Facebook reached 500 million users. 500 million users is a huge number… granted there can be many duplicates, even 400 million is a huge number.

So, any guesses when is the next time a web app will reach 1 billion user base? With such a fast penetration of the internet, I hope more people will be able to access it cheaper in the coming years.

I would say 2015… 5 more years for a web app to reach 1 billion user base. What do you say?