Announcing SolarWinds Observability SaaS

Blogging services have been around for a long time, with pioneers like Blogger paving the way for Wordpress.com and more recent arrivals like Tumblr and Posterous. There are millions upon millions of blogs out there, many of them residing on these services.

One big bonus of using a blogging service is that they take much of the pain away from having a blog since they handle the hosting for its users and everything is already set up. Once you publish, the responsibility for keeping that content available online rests firmly on the shoulders of the blogging service.

With that in mind, we decided to test five of today’s most popular blogging services to see how reliable they actually are.

RESTful APIs have become increasingly popular both among web services and developers and are easy to serve up with the same software used for regular web pages. In May of 2010, 74% of web APIs used REST as their protocol.

When setting up servers for a REST API it can make sense to use a web server software that is a bit more lightweight than what you’d use for a full-blown website. The gains are, at least in theory, that each API server that way could handle more requests since it would be less taxing on system resources.

But is that what actually happens, or do most web services just put up an Apache server, same as they would do for a regular website?

Remember the recent discussion around Facebook’s “Face” trademark?

That whole discussion made us remember some rather funny or just plain strange examples of trademarks we’d seen from big players like IBM, Microsoft, Apple and Google in the past. Companies do love their trademarks…

Here are a few of the stranger ones.

Nokia is the world’s largest manufacturer of mobile phones. Lately the company has had its thunder stolen by Apple’s iPhone and the plethora of Android devices flooding the market, especially in the fast-growing smartphone market.

In other words, Nokia is in a bit of trouble. However, considering how much flack the company has been getting lately in the tech press, we thought it would be nice to look back and give Nokia some credit for what they have accomplished in the past. Because it’s a past filled to the brim with innovation.

Computer hardware has become infinitely more powerful through the years, a trend that has allowed computer makers to push the performance to levels we almost thought were impossible just a decade earlier.

The exponential growth of computing performance is very noticeable when you examine how the performance of the world’s most powerful computer systems, the supercomputers, has changed over time.

Where do you think Apple’s iPhone is the most popular? Where does Nokia’s Symbian phones dominate? How is it going for Android in different parts of the world? What about Blackberry?

We’re going to answer all of those questions and more in this article, which will closely examine mobile OS usage across the world.

Text and numbers are all good and well, but sometimes it’s nice to just be presented with a nice visual.

This post is full of videos of just that, interesting visualizations of data. Being the geeks we are, they’re of course all related to the Web and the Internet.

Enjoy!

We increasingly access the Web from our mobile phones, especially now that the rise of smartphones is making it easier than ever to get a decent web experience on the small screen.

However, the highest share of mobile web usage isn’t in the most developed nations, but rather in the developing nations of the world.

“What if Google does it?”

That has to be a pretty common question among startups when they discuss their business plans. Gaining Google as a sudden competitor is usually not good news.

The problem is, no matter how brilliant your software or service may be, there’s always a cloud on the horizon. There are elephants out there, the likes of Google, Microsoft, Apple, and now also Facebook, and those elephants can come crashing into your glass house at any time. All they need to do is release a similar product.

It happens all the time.

China just officially climbed to the top position in the supercomputer performance race. You may have read that the country now has the fastest, and also the third fastest, supercomputer in the world.

But this was no overnight success. It’s been a long race for China to get there. Back in the 90s, China’s presence in the supercomputer top 500 was almost non-existent, so most of this progress has happened in the last decade.

The trend is clear, a lot of companies want the mobile phone to become your new wallet and replace the credit card.

Google will add support for it with Android 2.3, also known as Gingerbread. Nokia will support it on its 2011 Symbian phones. Apple is rumored to be working on it as well.

How fast are Internet connections across the world? How fast are they in your country?

This article examines the real-world connection speeds for people in the top 50 countries on the Internet, i.e. the countries with the most Internet users.

This list of countries ranges from China at number 1 with 420 million Internet users, and Denmark at number 50 with 4.75 million Internet users.

Xserve, Apple’s rather elegant server hardware (seen here above), was introduced back in 2002. Less than a week ago, Apple announced that it will be discontinued after January 31, 2011. Apparently, Xserve wasn’t selling enough.

Apple isn’t killing its server OS, though. It will continue to deliver Mac OS X Server, but on Mac Pro and Mac Mini instead.

This means that Apple is backing out of the server hardware business, completely. Mac Pro, although powerful, is a workstation computer, with everything that means in terms of form factor and other hardware design decisions. Mac Mini, although small, can’t be considered a decent Xserve replacement either. Simply put, none of the two are servers.

Web developers fight a constant struggle: They want to use modern web browser features, but they also need to take browser adoption into consideration. If a large portion of their users run older versions of browsers, web developers will be limited in what they can accomplish.

With this in mind, we decided to find out how many people are running the latest version of their browser, whether it be Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari or Opera.

A few weeks ago, Google made its URL shortener, Goo.gl, open for everyone and gave it its own website, similar to Bit.ly’s. Previously, Goo.gl could only be used by Google’s own services.

When they announced this, Google made a pretty bold statement: “… we do want it to be the stablest, most secure, and fastest URL shortener on the web.”

That’s something that we should test, isn’t it?

You probably hate slow websites. So do we, and it’s pretty safe to say that it’s a universal rule.

There are a number of factors that can make a web page slow to load, both on the client side (the browser) and on the server side, but one really big factor is page size, and that’s what we’ll be talking about in this article. Hopefully you’ll pick up some useful information along the way.

It doesn’t feel like 2000 was all that long ago, does it? But on the Internet, a decade is a long time. Ten years ago we were in the era of the dot-com boom (and bust), the Web was strictly 1.0, and Google was just a baby.

Since then people have welled onto the Internet. You don’t actually realize how many more people are on the Internet now until you start comparing numbers. This article is an in-depth study of how the number of Internet users has grown in the past decade.

We’ll start with the whole world, then world regions, then break it down even further into countries. As you’ll see, a lot has happened.

Yesterday, Apple announced that it will be launching an App Store for Mac OS X, modelled after the App Store for iPhone and iPad. It will be available 90 days from now and we believe it will be a game-changer for several reasons.

Why? Because it maps a very successful concept from the handheld world to the world of the personal computer (yes, the Mac is a PC…), and it translates very well.

Here is why it will be a success.

Google began strictly as a search company, and it’s still their bread and butter. However, as the company has grown, it’s spread its tentacles like a giant octopus out to most parts of the Web. A benevolent giant octopus, providing lots of highly useful services, but a giant nonetheless. Try surfing the Web without touching a single Google service. It’s impossible.

Google even shows up in places you’d never expect it to. For example, you know those “captchas” that websites and online forums use to verify that you’re human? Google bought reCAPTCHA in 2009 and is currently using the captcha input from hundreds of millions of users to improve its text recognition software.

But that’s just a tiny little service. Let’s see where Google has a more dominant presence, starting with, but not ending with, search.

Looks like the tide of the web API protocol war (if there ever was one) has shifted firmly in REST’s favor while SOAP has been forced back. Web developers have cast their votes, they want RESTful APIs.

Here is the distribution of the different API protocols and styles, comparing the situation in 2008 versus that of 2010, based on ProgrammableWeb’s directory of more than 2,000 web APIs.