There have been a number of devastating tornadoes in the Southeastern United States this past week, with the homes in many communities reduced to rubble. While certain things can be rebuilt or replaced, photographs lost in the storm often cannot be. A new Facebook page has been created after the storms that aims to reunite owners with photographs scattered in the winds, and already boasts close to 50,000 fans and 600+ uploaded photographs. It’s a neat idea, and a great example of how Facebook can be used for good and not just procrastination.

Pictures and Documents found after the April 27, 2011 Tornadoes (via PhotoWeeklyOnline)

Update: Interesting turn of events… Looks like Facebook didn’t like what was going on, and killed off the page. Wow.

Update: Never mind. Looks like the URL of the page got changed or something. Here it is.

With the ongoing craze in photo sharing services on mobile devices, it’s not surprising to see new photo apps launching left and right. Stealthy startup Path is a bit different though, with their high powered team launching an unusual sharing service service a couple days ago.
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Facebook recently announced that it has increased the maximum size of photographs from 604 pixels to 720 pixels, a difference of 19.2%. They posted the above photograph showing the relative difference in size.

While this is pretty exciting news for those of you who upload your photographs to Facebook (how many of you are there, really?), this is actually a much bigger deal for the company that most people probably realize. With a 20% increase in the size of photograph they allow, they increase their storage demands by at least 20%.

20% for a smaller photo sharing service might not be too significant, but for Facebook it’s a huge change. Why? Because Facebook is the most popular photo sharing service on the web. We’re talking billions of photographs per month, and petabytes of total storage. Just how much data is a petabyte? Check out this neat infographic by Mozy.

Don’t worry though. Facebook’s revenues are expected to be up to $2 billion this year.

P.S. Did we mention we love the prefix “peta”?