Facebook recently introduced its Timeline interface to its 850 million monthly active users. The interface is designed to make it easy to navigate much of the immense amount of information that the social network has gathered about each of its users—and to prompt them to add and share even more in a way that's easy to analyze.

Facebook's motivation is to better target the advertisements that are responsible for 85 percent of its revenue. In part, successful targeting is a numbers game. If reported trends have held steady, Facebook's data warehouse was adding 625,000 terabytes of compressed data daily by last January. Timeline's new features are bound to boost that number dramatically, potentially providing Facebook with more personal data than any other ad seller online can access.