Russell Beattie

June 6, 2012 4:20 p.m.

I can't believe it, but it seems that Google might actually be making headway with Google+ ... My blog posts get meager traffic nowadays, but of the 360 total page views of my most recent post, of the ones that had referrers, roughly half were from Google+ and half from Twitter (t.co and dlvr.it).

Amazing, but true.

Also, it seems people are starting to use Google+ as an actual blog like Linus Torvalds. This also amazes me. Remember when a blog wasn't a blog without detailed design customization, RSS feeds and sane permalinks? No longer...

I should be posting this on my personal blog, but I'll probably get just as much traffic here. (I wish there was a way to attach an image so I could track the views and see what's really happening...)

June 6, 2012 5:49 p.m.

Google+ permalinks are fucking insane. My previous post is uniquely identified by this:

/ 104961845171318028721 / posts / 3HSYUouyqkh

The first identifier seems to be my personal ID number (rather than something complicated like, you know, my user name). If you were to say it as a number it'd be 104 quintillion, 961 quadrillion, 845 trillion, 171 billion, 318 million, 28 thousand and 721.

According to Wolfram Alpha, this is roughly the equivalent to 14 billion times the number of people currently on Earth. Google apparently is prepared for some serious population growth.

BUT that's not all, apparently each individual Google+ entry also has a unique identifier (after the /post/). It seems smaller, but since the second identifier is using numbers and letters (both capital and lowercase), it's actually nearly as large: (26 x 2) + 10 or 64 possibilities per character = 64 ^ 11 = 73 quintilian.

If I wrote a post every second, it would take me 2.315 trillion years to use all the IDs. (Incidently, 2.3 trillion years is roughly 700 times the age of the universe).

So, not only do Google+ permalinks suck balls in terms of usability, they are mathematically ridiculous. I thought GOOG was full of engineers and eggheads and shit? Have they all left to start other companies? Apparently so.

Oh, and I almost forgot to total the number of database entries Google is ready to keep track of: 104 quintilian x 73 quintilian is 7592000000000000000000000000000000000000 (pronounced 7 duodecillion, 592 undecillion).

Wolfram Alpha just gave up trying to find something to compare that to. 

-Russ

(Yeah, I originally posted these on Google+, but decided they should also live here as well. :-) )