Announcing SolarWinds Observability SaaS

We all love the Internet, but using it also has its fair share of frustrations. This becomes fairly obvious when you look at the automatic suggestions that Google makes as you type in your searches…

It’s finally happened. After a long reign at the top, Microsoft’s Windows XP is no longer the most widely used desktop operating system in the United States, instead turning the crown over to Windows 7.

As of April, Windows 7 has 31.71% of the desktop operating system market, compared to 31.56% for Windows XP.

Here is the current distribution of desktop operating systems in the United States, based on the first seven days of April.

We’ve mentioned the tremendous growth of Facebook at numerous occasions on this blog, and it’s fascinating how fast the social network has risen from being an upstart fighting with MySpace to basically leaving the entire social media landscape behind in the dust.

Since Facebook is now so ginormous (that’s the scientific term for it, right?) we wanted to give you a frame of reference for how big the service has become. And as we so often do, we’ve done it with a chart. 🙂

As of today, the new public reports (a.k.a. public status pages) are no longer in beta. We here at Pingdom would like to thank you all for your feedback during the beta testing period.

The old-style public reports will continue to work until May 31. After that date, they will automatically redirect to the new reports.

If you’re not already using the new style of public report (it uses a different URL than the old one), now might be a good time to switch. All the information you need is available under Public Reports in the Pingdom control panel.

There’s been a lot of talk about how big Facebook has become, and with its 600 million users (!) it has certainly become a force to be reckoned with. But there is still one player out there that dwarfs Facebook, and that is Google.

The problem is that it’s extremely difficult to estimate just how big Google actually is. But we’re going to try anyway.

Pingdom’s new public reports (a.k.a. status pages) now support custom domains.

Normally your public report pages show up under the stats.pingdom.com domain when you activate them, but now you can set up your own custom domain for them, for example status.mywebsite.com.

As you may know if you’re a regular reader of this blog, sometimes we like to take a trip down memory lane. It’s time for another one of those trips, to the murky past of the Internet and the dawning World Wide Web of 1995.

Let’s start first with the people who actually use the Internet. How many were there back then?

From today and onward, Pingdom has two blogs. Yes, two. Read on and you’ll understand why.

There’s our good old Royal Pingdom, where we will continue to ramble on about web tech, the Internet and geeky things that don’t necessarily have anything to do with Pingdom the company.

Then there’s the new addition: the official Pingdom blog. This blog will be 100% dedicated to giving you news about Pingdom’s products (mainly our uptime monitoring service) and what’s happening with the company itself. We’ll also be generous with tips and tricks that Pingdom users might find useful.

You’ve been asking for it, ladies and gentlemen, and now you have it: a Pingdom app for Android.

Just like our iPhone app, the Pingdom Android app is an excellent companion to the Pingdom uptime monitoring service. It lets you connect to your Pingdom account to view the status of the servers and websites you’re monitoring, and also supports alerts via push notifications.

The app is free, and works together with all types of Pingdom accounts (including free accounts).

Although Facebook is by far the largest social network out there, the social network sphere is large and has a ton of players. We were curious about which of them are the most active. To find these sites, we decided to focus on the number of daily visitors to each site.

The number of (unique) daily visitors is an interesting metric since it doesn’t rely on registered users (who may or may not be active) or monthly visitors, where some may visit the site as seldom as once per month. In short, you get a good idea of the day-to-day activity on a site.

As you no doubt have noticed by now, Mozilla launched Firefox 4 this week. It was downloaded 7.1 million times in the first 24 hours, and is now up to 15 million downloads and counting.

We figured a Firefox infographic would be nice to celebrate this event, so we made one for you. We hope you like it!

Things have been going so well with the new Pingdom REST API that we have decided to move forward and make it public. In fact, we made it public yesterday.

The new API will remain in beta for a few weeks just in case, but this is pretty much the final thing. It’s more of a release candidate than a beta.

The goal with this new API was to make it as powerful and flexible as possible, but still easy to use. It gives Pingdom users full access to their accounts via the API. The feedback we have received so far has been great.

Have you ever wondered where in the world Macs are the most popular? We have, so we decided to find out.

To do this, we examined OS market share numbers from across the world to identify the countries where Mac OS X has the highest market share.

You’d expect the United States, Apple’s home market, to lead the pack, but it’s not quite that simple.

During and after the earthquake and tsunami disaster in Japan this Friday, local phone networks became overloaded. Not just because of damage to infrastructure, but mainly because the networks simply couldn’t handle the flood of calls and text messages that followed.

This kind of overload is basically what happens around midnight at New Year’s Eve, only much worse, because everyone was worried about family and friends and wanted information as soon as possible.

Internet connections, however, continued to work for the most part, so people turned to social media instead.

Forbes came out with their yearly “rich list” this week, also known as The World’s Billionaires 2011. As usual, it contains a wealth (pardon the pun) of data and we’ve pulled all the stats together for you and added some of our own.

Rather than just giving you a top list of the world’s billionaires (which you might as well read about over at Forbes.com), we went a step farther and created a statistical overview, with plenty of charts, factoids and lists for you to enjoy.

This week, Spotify announced that it’s reached a big milestone: One million paying subscribers (out of a total of nearly 7 million active users). With this, it’s the largest music subscription service outside of Asia (apparently a South Korean service called Melon holds the top spot, according to FT.com).

That becomes even more impressive if you take into account that Spotify only launched two years ago and is available in just seven countries: the United Kingdom, Sweden (Spotify was founded by Swedes), Norway, Finland, France, Spain and the Netherlands.

Big data has become one the new buzzwords on the Internet. It refers to the massive amounts of data that many modern web services deal with. This post will list some of the more useful software available to web developers for working with big data.

Few tech companies can tap into the zeitgeist like Apple does. Another excellent example of this has been the hype build-up leading up to the iPad 2 launch. People just couldn’t stop talking about it.

Of course, with the first iPad being such a popular product, interest in its successor has been growing rapidly over the past few months, and speculation has been running rampant.

You know how we love proper data, so here is a graph showing the interest in iPad 2 leading up to the March 2 announcement (based on Google search stats).

Site issues come in all shapes and forms, and no one seems immune. Google’s Gmail problems the last couple of days, where a number of Gmail users temporarily lost all of their emails, was proof that Murphy’s Law is alive and well on the Internet.

However, this post is not really about that specific incident, but rather about an interesting detail in the way Google communicated the problem.

The recent events in countries like Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and several other places have once more reminded us why the Internet is such a game changer. It facilitates the flow of information and mass communication to levels unprecedented in history. It is organic, and in most cases, independent of national interests. It circumvents the traditional, official channels of information.