Yahoo hopes to create more apps than no. of atoms in observable universe

One of the latest news is that Yahoo has launched BOSS (Build your Own Search Service) using which you can build search based apps. Being a part geek who loves to show off my part knowledge to other part geeks during parties, I went to their website to register for my own app.

The registration process was smooth, and soon they gave me my app id which has 64 case-sensitive alpha-numeric characters.

64 Frigging Characters.

A quick calc tells me that is roughly “5,164,973,859,965,250,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000” combinations possible.

That is even more roughly 5.1 × 10¹¹⁴

Do you know what is less than that? No. of Atoms in observable universe, number of atoms in whole frigging observable universe my dear blog reader, which btw are roughly 10⁸⁰, are less than the number of applications that Yahoo is hoping to create. For the curious out there, the observable universe contains anywhere between 30 to 70 billion trillion stars.

May be they REALLY want to make sure that no one guesses away the app id. I am not sure why they bother to go even way beyond GUID limits to come up with these freakishly large appIDs, I mean who are we competing with here? Some aliens trying to steal away my apps by guessing the appIDs? Huh!

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