Flood of data represents promise and peril for Web companies

All those photos we’re posting on Facebook and those tweets about our last meal might seem trivial on their own.

But in fact the unstoppable desire by so many people to share, well, just about everything is generating a flood of data that has left companies feeling simultaneously overwhelmed as they attempt to manage the deluge and giddy with the sense that they have stumbled onto a goldmine — if they can just figure out how to use all that information.

The subject of "Big Data" has been dominating conversations among insiders throughout Silicon Valley the past year. And reflecting that, it was the main theme of the eighth annual Web 2.0 Summit that convened this week in San Francisco, dubbed the "The Data Frame."

By Chris O’Brien

Mercury News Columnist

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