Announcing SolarWinds Observability SaaS

Here’s a thought, or rather a theory, that we’d love to run by you.

It starts with a little piece of irony. Most advertisers want people to buy their product, i.e. pay for it. When an app (on any platform) is free and sponsored by ads, a large portion of its user base will be people who want something for free. If we’re allowed to generalize here, they don’t want to pay if they can avoid it.

Spotted the problem yet?

Google’s new social network, Google+, is gaining users at a frenetic pace. Presumably people are signing up for it faster than any new social network in history.

There will be many who bemoan that there’s now yet another social network out there to keep track of. Weren’t there enough already? Don’t Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and all those other sites cover our social networking needs? “I don’t want another social network!”

But here’s the cool thing. The fact that Google+ has gotten some serious wind in its sails (unlike the dead-in-the-water duck that is Google Buzz) will bring something sorely needed to the social space: Competition.

Our friends over at PagerDuty recently announced that they have added Pingdom integration to their service.

In case you haven’t heard of it, PagerDuty is an alerting service that lets you combine the results from multiple monitoring tools and services. It lets you centralize things like alerts, on-call scheduling, alert escalations, etc.

When you research web browser statistics and trends, one thing soon becomes clear: Google Chrome is on a tear. It’s gaining users, fast. In less than three years, it has claimed more than 20% of the global web browser market and is without a doubt one of Google’s biggest success stories so far.

And the really amazing thing is that at the current rate, Chrome will overtake both Firefox and IE within a year and become the world’s most widely used web browser.

Yes, you read that right. We’ll soon explain how we got to that conclusion. (If you’re the impatient kind, scroll down to the second chart.)

Top500.org recently released updated statistics about the fastest supercomputers in the world. They do this twice per year, and every time the reports make computing enthusiasts drool with mind-boggling performance numbers. You think your souped-up server or gaming rig is fast? Think again.

We cherry-picked some of the more interesting numbers, and made a few additional calculations for your reading pleasure. Enjoy.

As you may have noticed if you’re a Pingdom user, we had problems yesterday. In this post we will do our best to explain what happened and why, and how we will learn from this going forward.

And let us also take this opportunity to sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you. It’s super-important for us to provide you with a quality service, and those of you who have been with us for a long time hopefully know that we deliver on that promise. This was an extreme, highly unusual scenario.

It pays to combine your web service with a really good, well-documented and easy-to-use API. We’re finding this out first hand with our REST API. People keep doing cool things with it.

Services like Geckoboard have added Pingdom widgets, a UK developer recently made an excellent third-party Pingdom app for Windows Phone 7, and new things keep showing up.

Case in point:

Just over a week ago, a fellow Swede (Markus Liljedahl) released a neat little third-party Pingdom notifier for Mac.

The web browser market is an ever-changing landscape. It can sometimes be rocky ground for web designers and web developers trying to make their websites and services work for all the various browser versions available out there. It’s challenging work, to say the least.

That’s why it pays to be aware of what the web browser market looks like, and stay up to date. How many are using the various browsers out there? How many are using the latest versions? Which versions are the most common? How big an audience may you be annoying if your site isn’t perfect in a specific browser version?

Internet Explorer 9 launched on March 14 this year, a full three months ago. It’s free software. It’s clearly a better web browser than previous IE versions. Yet only 13% of IE users have adopted IE9 so far. In other words, IE9 adoption is going… kinda slowly.

Compare that with the adoption of Firefox 4. It was launched on March 22, just over a week after IE9, yet 56% of Firefox users are already running Firefox 4. It’s been downloaded more than 200 million times and counting (the current count is 218 million).

A little update from Velocity 2011…

This is pretty cool. There’s a massive job board here at the conference where a bunch of Silicon Valley companies (and Silicon Valley-ish companies elsewhere) are looking for top-of-line operations and developer ninjas. Understandable, since there are a lot of insanely talented people around at this conference.

There are notes from Flickr, YouTube, Netflix, Groupon, Canonical, and many others. Quite a few business cards are pinned to the board, too. For you not at Velocity, this is what it looks like:

First there was the Mac line of computers, then Apple added the iPod, then the iPhone, and little over a year ago, the iPad. Over the past 10 years, Apple has gone from being a computer company to being a true consumer brand.

This can be easily illustrated by looking at search trends, in this case the overall interest in Apple’s various product lines over the years (courtesy of Google Trends).

Read on for a very revealing chart…

Next week it’s time for one of the most interesting conferences in our field: O’Reilly’s Velocity 2011. It’s all about scalability, web performance and operations and features a ton of interesting speakers, including bright minds from Google, Yahoo, Twitter, Microsoft, Akamai, Mozilla, Heroku, Opera and many other companies.

Several of us from Pingdom will be attending the conference to learn, be inspired and meet interesting people in the Internet industry.

We posted this in the Pingdom blog but thought that you regular readers of Royal Pingdom might also enjoy it, so here it is, a sneak preview of our up-and-coming, super-designed office:

We’re about to enter a new phase in Pingdom’s history. Over the next few months, we’ll be hiring even more people, and our current office is starting to feel a bit small.

That’s why we’ll soon be upgrading to “Pingdom Office 2.0.” We’ve already picked the office space, signed the lease, and the plan is to move in at the beginning of 2012. Before we move in, the whole office will have been rebuilt and custom designed for us, and will rival some of the coolest offices out there. We’re aiming for awesomeness.

We’re about to enter a new phase in Pingdom’s history. Over the next few months, we’ll be hiring even more people, and our current office is starting to feel a bit small.

That’s why we’ll soon be upgrading to “Pingdom Office 2.0.” We’ve already picked the office space, signed the lease, and the plan is to move in at the beginning of 2012. Before we move in, the whole office will have been rebuilt and custom designed for us, and will rival some of the coolest offices out there. We’re aiming for awesomeness.

Microsoft is one of the largest and most profitable tech companies in the world, but sometimes we can’t help but feel a bit sorry for them.

Why? Because the online community won’t cut them any slack whatsoever. There is so little love shown that it’s scary. If there’s even the slightest chance that something can be blamed on Microsoft, it will.

Whatever the exact opposite of goodwill is, Microsoft has plenty of it.

We’re happy to announce that starting today, CloudFlare users have super-easy access to the Pingdom uptime monitoring service via CloudFlare Apps. With just one click, they can set up a free Pingdom account to monitor their website.

We have to give credit to CloudFlare for encouraging independent monitoring of their service. Clearly, they have nothing to hide and want their users to stay on top of their website uptime and performance. That a service promotes transparency is always a good sign.

Tech is generally thought of as a male-dominated field, so it’s not surprising to see that visitors to tech blogs are predominantly male. What you might find a bit sad is just how massively the men outweigh the women.

To find out what the balance looked like, we picked out a group of popular tech blogs (and a couple of tech blog aggregators) and examined how many of their website visitors are male versus female with the help of demographics data from Google’s DoubleClick Ad Planner.

The sites included in this survey are: TechCrunch, GigaOM, Mashable, ReadWriteWeb, Techmeme, Slashdot, The Next Web, Slashgear, Hacker News, Venturebeat, TUAW, BGR, Daring Fireball, All Things D, and AppleInsider.

Exactly eight years ago today, Matt Mullenweg announced that the first release of WordPress was available for download. We wonder if he knew what he was starting.

Much has happened with the blogging software since then. For one, WordPress has become the most popular blog platform in the world, which is no small feat. It’s also without a doubt one of the most successful open source projects ever created.

Protecting one’s brand is pretty much standard practice for large online properties like Facebook. As a result, the social network giant now owns hundreds of domain names, of which only a few are actually used. The rest have been taken over from others for “safekeeping.”

We find it rather amusing that Facebook itself now owns domain names such as:

Want to work for a popular, fast-growing web service with a global audience? Live in Sweden? Then you have an excellent opportunity right now.

Things are going great for us here at Pingdom. Our website monitoring service is growing by leaps and bounds, and now we’re in the midst of a push to expand our team with another set of talented individuals.