Announcing SolarWinds Observability SaaS

What happened with the Internet in 2009?

How many websites were added? How many emails were sent? How many Internet users were there? This post will answer all of those questions and many more. Prepare for information overload, but in a good way. 😉

Now here’s an interesting piece of information. Skype has, as you may be aware of, become hugely popular and has a reported 521 million registered users. It turns out that that is enough to take a considerable chunk of change away from the traditional telephone companies, especially when it comes to those expensive international long-distance calls.

DNS, the Domain Name System, is one of the major pillars of the Internet. It’s a critical service, and without it we would all have to use IP addresses instead of handy domain names like “Pingdom.com” when we want to visit websites, send emails, and so on.

However, DNS has a huge flaw. Because DNS lacks security features it has been relatively easy for hackers to trick DNS servers with false information. By tricking DNS servers, hackers have been able to hijack entire websites. Needless to say, attacks such as these are a security nightmare and can be used for a large variety of malicious purposes such as site defacement, phishing, malware installations, and more.

On most social networks, you have to create a username when you sign up. Not only that, that username has to be unique, no duplicates allowed. Facebook on the other hand just takes your real name, no username, and it doesn’t matter if there’s someone already on the site with the same name as yours.

There are probably hundreds of factors that add up to explain Facebook’s success, but the question is if using real names instead of usernames isn’t one of the key features that have helped Facebook grow as large as it has.

Have you ever wondered about those key moments in time that made open source software such an immense success story? We just did, and here below is our list.

We have narrowed the list down to what we consider the nine most important events that shaped open source into what it is today. The focus is on events that propelled open source forward and resulted in a rich inheritance, or events that strengthened the reputation of open source software in the eyes of the public.

PageRank (PR) was Google’s original secret weapon, a scale that would rank websites based on incoming links and where those links came from. Although its relevance has arguably faded a bit over the years as Google has added more and more criteria to site rankings, it still goes hand in hand with SEO and every webmaster out there wants to have a high PR.

But do you need a high PR to have a successful site? Search rankings are one thing, but what about actual site popularity and traffic?

According to a new data center survey, Windows-based servers are more than twice as common in the enterprise as Linux servers.

The Symantec-sponsored survey included answers from the IT departments of 1,780 enterprises in 26 countries. It included small, medium-sized and large enterprises from a wide variety of industries, with the lower limit being companies with at least 1,000 employees.

Some sites are utterly addictive. You return to them often, and when you do, you tend to stay there for a good while, visiting different pages, viewing interesting content. In a word, the site is engaging.

But how do you measure it? How do you put a number on how engaging a site is?

That is exactly what we are going to do in this post, and we will be looking at social network sites, arguably the most engaging sites out there.

The launch of the social news site Digg in 2004 was the perfect example of a good idea at the right time. That was the year the term “Web 2.0” started being thrown about to describe the rise of new web technologies that allowed for more interactive sites, and an increased focus on user collaboration. Back then, the notion of a news site that was driven almost entirely by users was completely new and innovative, and Digg quickly rose in popularity. It sparked the rise of many similar social news sites, and was also the beginning of founder Kevin Rose’s move from television personality to web entrepreneur.

Did you ever wonder how busy the servers of the world’s largest social networks are? It turns out it’s very hard work being popular, especially for the number one player.

According to data from Google, Facebook serves 260 billion page views per month. That’s more than six million page views per minute, or a staggering 37.4 trillion page views in a year. We can safely assume that Facebook’s web servers aren’t getting bored waiting around for work to do.

With 2010 upon us, it seems like we know what to expect from most players in the smartphone market. Apple will iterate on the iPhone to compete with the bleeding edge Android phones (and possibly give us a 3G enabled tablet in the process), we’ll see more Android phones than ever come out, and Microsoft is due to roll out Windows Mobile 7 at some point. But we’ve yet to hear much about 2010 from the company that arguably garnered the most smartphone buzz in early 2009: Palm.

What follows is an exploration of what went wrong for Palm in 2009 after their astonishing CES performance, and what they need to do remain relevant throughout the next year.

The world of search is moving quickly, with promises of big advances in 2010.
From augmented reality to personalized results, here are ten trends and changes you can expect to see in search in the next year. 2010 will for sure bring lots of new technology and changes to the table for search.

If you are a webmaster and you have an iPhone then prepare yourself, because here is a list of ten of the very best iPhone apps for webmasters. These apps will help you to manage your website, on the go and with ease. Best of all these apps are free to download. With the exception of Chartbeat and Analytics Agent Lite, these apps are fully functional versions, and each is useful in its own unique way.

Happy Holidays everyone! It’s Christmas time now and we’ll be taking a short break here on Pingdom’s blog. We’ll be back next Monday.
Until then, here are some of our best posts from 2009 that you may have missed.

Do you have a website? Do you like knowing that it’s working ok? Pingdom exists for this very reason, to alert you when your site has downtime, so you can fix it. With this in mind we have released a new application that we call the Pingdom Desktop Notifier, which sits in your Windows system tray.

Next year is going to be a big year for web browsers. In 2010, we’ll hopefully see Firefox 4, Internet Explorer 9, Safari 5, and possibly even Chrome 5. This new batch of browsers will include several new features that have the potential to entirely change the way we interact with the Web.

Now that this decade is coming to an end, we thought it would be a good time to list the very worst Internet disasters that happened between 2000 and 2009. And believe us, there have been some really big ones. Some you may remember, and some may be new to you, but they all affected a huge amount of Internet users.
We focused on Internet service disruptions that lasted a significant amount of time and affected many people. Other criteria were that the incident shouldn’t be about any one single service or website and that it should be technical in nature (i.e. the dot-com bubble bursting in 2000 doesn’t count).

Pingdom’s management team recently visited Boston, USA, for some meetings. On their way back they had some time left over at the airport and decided to get some work done. Nicely enough, Google is currently offering everyone free Wi-Fi at a large number of US airports, including the Logan International Airport in Boston.
So, free Wi-Fi. Sounds great, right?

The World Wide Web has promised a lot over the years. Thus far, some of those promises have been fulfilled, but there have also been disappointments. One area that I feel has been consistently disappointing in recent years is the promise of newer, more powerful, and more useful file formats. I’ll take a look at three of these: SVG, JPEG 2000, and MNG, below.

These days if you try to find news involving the word “cloud,” you’re more likely to get an article about cloud computing than you are finding a weather report. If the amount of news referencing “cloud” is anything to go by, the media has embraced this new terminology with open arms, starting in 2008.