In an effort to figure out how many e-mails, videos, photos and other digital transmissions were collectively uploaded and passed around the web in 2010, Pingdom, an internet monitoring service, corralled a number of research reports and company statistics to create a visual representation of a single year of total internet data activity.
Besides the 107 trillion e-mail messages (including spam) sent in 2010, Pingdom found that there were 1.97 billion internet users worldwide: 825.1 million in Asia, 475.1 million in Europe and 266.2 million in North America.
In the social media realm, Twitter's 100 million users sent 25 billion tiny messages. Facebook obtained 600 million users — nearly double what it started with at the beginning of the year — and hosted 360 billion links, notes and photos. Flickr also saw a notable traffic uptick, with 130 million photos uploaded each month. On YouTube, users watched 730 billion videos.