"Today there are two new registrations with the site every second..." makes me throw up in my mouth a little bit. It's so contradictory to the very claim that data is awesome.
Here's a statistic....people do things, and they do them every few seconds. And this will blow your mind......as the population grows, more people will be doing more things. Sorry to blow your mind so early in the day.
I mostly agree. The form "x events every minute" is useless when you need a ratio to make sense of things. Current fave: the US borrows $2B every day, which sounds impressive, but is 0.01% of the $15,800,000M US GDP. So, in most cases, the formulation is a way of impressing rubes (who don't have a sense of the denominator) with how big some quantity is, when the quantity may not be big in a meaningful way.
But for someone who has a sense of the denominator, it may be useful. E.g. if you're provisioning servers for LinkedIn, you could probably estimate how many you've got to stand up every day/week/month/year based on 2 registrations/second.
Here's a statistic....people do things, and they do them every few seconds. And this will blow your mind......as the population grows, more people will be doing more things. Sorry to blow your mind so early in the day.