Announcing SolarWinds Observability SaaS

Microsoft is not the company that comes to mind when you think about great design. Apple, perhaps, but not Microsoft.

But that may be changing, which we discovered when we looked back over 30 years of hardware designs from Microsoft. Although it took Redmond quite a while to get up to speed, its designs are starting to look pretty cool.

In just over two years, the share of web traffic in Asia that comes from mobile devices has almost tripled. In fact, in some countries, close to half of all web traffic comes from mobile devices. India is very close to mobile traffic breaking 50% of all web traffic, as are several other countries in Asia as well as Africa.

As we reported last Friday, the number of DNS root servers on the Internet has grown significantly the past few years. Now we will take a closer look at how those root servers are distributed across the world.

Since the root servers are critical to Internet’s DNS infrastructure, they would ideally be spread out in a way that serves the Internet population in a fair and even manner. That is, however, not the case.

Technorati’s Top 100 blogs is a great list, which we often use for various articles. It’s also a great place for you to find new blogs and other sites to follow, for all kinds of topics.

Now we have a new public service to announce – we’re monitoring the uptime of all the sites in the Technorati Top 100.

Today, May 5, it is 20 years since the first version of “the grandfather of 3D shooters” – Wolfenstein 3D – was released. In the two decades since 1992, can you imagine how many hours gamers around the world have spent with that game, not to mention its successors like the Doom and Quake series of games?

But what may not be as well remembered is that Wolfenstein 3D helped pioneer shareware as a distribution model for games and other software. This turned out to be incredibly important in a period when users were moving from BBSs (Bulletin Board Systems) to the Internet as a place to get their software.

As we noted a couple of weeks ago, the number of Internet users has doubled in the past five years. To handle this enormous influx of users, Internet’s infrastructure needs to grow as well. The Domain Name System (DNS), a critical part of that infrastructure, has more than met the challenge.

Five years ago there were 123 DNS root server sites (the “backend” of DNS) spread out on the Internet. Today there are more than twice as many, over 300. Five years ago, 46 countries had root servers. Today, 76 have them.

After our last interview with a representative of the Apache HTTP Server Project, we didn’t expect to hear so soon again from the leader in web server software.

But we now have the great privilege to present an interview about web performance with Sander Temme, member of the Project Management Committee member and contributor to the Apache HTTP Server project.

This is a part of our continuing series of interviews about web performance.

In January, we reported that South Korea has the fastest average Internet connection speed in the world, a position it’s commanded for many years.

Now, in the latest figures for Q4 2011, South Korea has increased its average Internet speed to 17.5 Mbps with close to 48 Mbps recorded as a peak speed.

Unfortunately, the news for most of the rest of the world is not as good.

The United States is the “founding father” of the Internet, so it’s somewhat ironic that none of the 50 best-connected cities in the world today is American.

Instead, the list of the top 50 cities in terms of connection speed is dominated by South Korea and Japan. Cities from only two other countries make an appearance: China (with Hong Kong), and Sweden (with Umeå and Göteborg). Amazingly, only four countries have cities on this list.

We’re going to show you a chart that confirms what some of you already suspected, and Microsoft probably isn’t too happy about. A lot of people only use Internet Explorer because they have to at the office, but at home they use a different web browser.

On workdays around 35.1% of all web browsing is done with IE. On weekends that number consistently drops to around 32.8%.

So if IE usage dips every weekend, which browsers do people use instead? For the most part, Google’s Chrome. On weekends, IE and Chrome usage is pretty much neck and neck these days. You could say that for home use, they are now on equal terms.

There’s no doubt that when the first iPhone was launched in 2007, it revolutionized not only the mobile phone industry, but the tech industry at large.

But what we have discovered is that, at least in terms of the guiding principles behind the iPhone’s raison d’être, Apple has been thinking about this for a long time.

What we’re about to reveal originates in a document dated 1979, in which Jef Raskin, then Manager of Publications at Apple, laid out many guiding principles behind the Macintosh computer’s design.

It’s almost spooky how applicable it is to the modern Apple and its thinking especially behind the iPhone.

We’ve noted many successful open source projects and products before on this blog, and the Web is arguably the biggest one of them all.

Two such products we’ve failed to recognize, however, are the very first web browser and server, simply called World Wide Web, developed by Tim Berners-Lee.

Today is especially important in the history of the web since on April 30, 1993, CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, released World Wide Web into the public domain.

Knäppa is a recyclable camera just introduced by IKEA. It is complete with zoom (move your arms in and out) and image stabilization (rest your arms on something).

Clearly, Knäppa is super simple, made out of one sheet of cardboard that folds up, one button, two plastic screws, two batteries, and a USB port. The company wants customers to use the camera to take pictures of their homes to share with others through the IKEA website.

But what may be the most amazing thing about the Knäppa camera is that its manual comes in 29 languages.

George Orwell’s arguably most famous novel, the dystopian Nineteen Eighty-Four, coined a number of phrases that are in widespread use today. One of them was “Big Brother,” an authority figure who watches every move you make, everywhere. The term has become synonymous with mass surveillance. As you can imagine, the book is easily as relevant today as it was back in 1949 when it was first published. (It’s a great read, btw.)

The usual complaints about modern-era Big Brothers – aside from that annoying reality show – tend to be targeted at initiatives to place more surveillance cameras in various locations (e.g. the camera-riddled London). Then of course there is the monitoring of our activities on the Internet by governments, ISPs and organizations with their own agendas.

In this continuing series of interviews about web performance we now turn to cloud application platform provider Heroku.

James Ward, Principal Developer Evangelist at Heroku, will take us through the current state of web performance, detailing what Heroku is working on, and give some advice as well.

As you may have heard, Facebook very recently passed 900 million active users. We think it’s pretty safe to say that it’s by far the largest social network in history.

That number, 900 million, is hard to get your head around. It’s such a huge number. We thought it would be fun to illustrate it with a neat little infographic. Enjoy!

We hope you had Pingdom monitoring for WWDC tickets, as Apple just opened up this year’s ticket sales.

A little while ago we showed you how to set up an alert with our monitoring service, so that you could get notified when Apple started selling the tickets.

How many took advantage of this? Quite a few people did and here’s what some of them had to say.

Instagram is one of those crazy success stories, an app and social network that has grown tremendously fast. If you’ve noticed an increase in Instagram pictures being shared to other social networks lately, you’re not imagining things. Sharing from Instagram to Twitter is now double what it was two months ago, and 20x what it was a year ago.

Sharing from Instagram is not just increasing because more people are downloading the app, the average user is also sharing more. This according to data from Distimo (in collaboration with Skylines for photo sharing data), who just released their latest app store market report. The report also included this very revealing chart.

Google’s Dropbox competitor is finally here. At 09:30 PST, we detected that the drive.google.com website went live.

The interwebs have been buzzing with talk about this for a long time. Some of the earliest mentions of this service go back to 2006, so Google Drive has been many years in the making.

The recent intensity of the buzzing made us set up monitoring to see if we could catch Google in the act, so to speak. And now we have.

IRC (Internet Relay Chat) has been around since 1988, which makes it ancient in Internet terms. And although it’s still used by hundreds of thousands of users around the world, IRC has seen a dramatic downturn in usage.

We have talked to the creator of IRC, and others, about why the once so widely used technology has seemingly fallen out of favor with so many users.