Bieber, Gaga, and Netflix: Internet heavyweights

Justin Bieber uses 3% of Twitter's infrastructure. Netflix Instant accounts for 20% of all non-mobile internet usage in the US during prime time. Now David Galbraith has done some back-of-the-envelope calculations that show Lady Gaga racking up a big bandwidth bill for Google:

My rough estimate: Lady Gaga has cost Google 10 petabytes in bandwidth same as 10,000 text messages for everyone on earth. If Lady Gaga's Google bandwidth was charged at what ATT charges for SMS, it would have cost: 10.5 trillion dollars.

The rate for SMS messaging is obscene but the real money is in ink cartridges, right? Apparently not. HP's basic black inkjet cartridge is available at Amazon for the astounding price of $29 and will print 495 pages. Assuming 250 words per page and six characters per word (five char/word + one space), 10 petabytes of text messages would cost only $503 billion to print out (excluding paper costs, which would add ~$89 billion to the total). Who knew that texting was more expensive than inkjet printing by a factor of 20?

New celeb status item: your own servers at Twitter

From a tweet by Dustin Curtis quoting a Twitter employee:

At any moment, Justin Bieber uses 3% of our infrastructure. Racks of servers are dedicated to him.

When will references to "all my racks at Twitter" make it into pop/rap songs?

Bieber is the reason

My friend Chris Piascik has done a daily drawing every day for over 2 years. Some really good stuff. It's almost always a crazy squiggly monster of some sort or intricately hand-drawn typography.

He also loves The Misfits. A couple months ago, he mixed The Misfits' Crimson Ghost logo with a cat to get Cattitude. I thought the Crimson Ghost would go well with Justin Bieber, too, and have been asking Chris to do it for weeks. He finally did, and oh man, he might be making it a T Shirt, as well. 10 points if you get the reference in the title of this post.