Intel

The Internet is a busy place. Usually, we're all just puttering along online, watching silly cat videos, checking e-mail, and occasionally getting some work done. If you truly were to comprehend everything happening on the Internet at any given moment, it would drive you mad, much like Bowman in "2001: A Space Odyssey."

"The thing's hollow--it goes on forever--and--oh my God--it's full of Internets!"

Fortunately, Intel has broken down what happens in an Internet minute into an easy-to-digest infographic. First, let's look at the big-daddy number. Every minute, 639,800GB of global IP data is transferred. That's a little hard to really wrap the mind around, so let's get into some of the telling details.

In a single minute of Internet time, 204 million e-mails are sent. Online denizens view 20 million photos on Flickr. Twitter processes 100,000 new tweets and 320 new Twitter accounts are created. That's more than five new Twitter users per second. No wonder it's so hard to keep up with all that tweeting.

If you thought Twitter was busy, then check out the stats for YouTube. An Internet minute is filled with 30 hours of videos uploaded and 1.3 million video views (most of which probably involved "Gangnam Style" last year). Social media is certainly popular. Though people might say they're taking time-outs from Facebook, there are still 6 million Facebook views and 277,000 logins every minute.

At least Wikipedia is taking it easy, with six new articles published each minute. So what does all this mean? It means the Internet is crazy popular. Intel says the number of networked devices out there is equal to the world's population. We're definitely putting all those devices to use.

This data also may make us wonder a bit about the future. As the number of devices continues to rise, will our Internet infrastructure be able to keep up? Intel expects the number of networked devices to be double the world's population by 2015. At least we still will be limited by the number of hands and eyes we have available at any given time.