title: “The half life of your social media link.”

date: 2011-09-24

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”

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWszSUm-x2Y]

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?