Since February 8, the Joost website has had outages almost on a daily basis. Some short, some up to an hour long. With a full week left of February, the website has already been unavailable for a total of five hours and ten minutes this month.

This can be contrasted with January, when they had a total of one hour and forty minutes of downtime, most of which was on one occasion (January 5, for those interested). We have looked back six months into the past, and a streak of outages like this is unprecedented.

Here is what the downtime for the Joost website looks like so far in February:

Note that this table only includes data until February 21.

For those who don’t know, Joost is an ad-sponsored, partially P2P-based internet TV broadcast service started by the founders of Kazaa and Skype. Although still in beta they have gained a large following and the service has been covered extensively in the media and blogs.

Pingdom has monitored the website (www.joost.com) so we can’t comment on any service interruptions of their TV broadcasts (which are viewed through the Joost software), but the website outages can’t be good for them. They want to grow their user base, and this is done through the website.

Trailblazers, creatives and innovators have taken the Internet to where it is today and made it an essential part of our everyday lives. We have selected a number of interesting “firsts” from the history of the Internet (and the Web) for your reading pleasure.

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Facebook has announced that it now has 400 million active users. Just one year ago Facebook had 150 million users, so 2009 was an incredible year for the social media giant.

There can be no doubt that Facebook is pretty much unstoppable at the moment, a real juggernaut. For some perspective on Facebook’s amazing growth, we have put together this infographic. We hope you’ll enjoy it!

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Sometimes you want an easy way to share your Pingdom monitoring data with others. So far we’ve had public report pages that you can use, but now we’ve added one more sharing method that is very flexible and easy to use.

Enter our new “report banners”.

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Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock lately, you’ll know that last week Apple announced the iPad, its new tablet device. Reactions have been a mixed bag, and a storm of discussion has swept through the blogosphere about various features the iPad should or shouldn’t have had.

One of the main complaints so far has been the iPad’s lack of multitasking. (To be precise, multitasking is a bit of a misnomer here; the iPhone OS has multitasking. What people really mean is only allowing one app at a time to run.)

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The tech industry is littered with billionaires. We all enjoy a good income, but some clearly have earned more than others. Much, much more. The question is, how much money do the really big names in tech actually have?

To find out, we went through the Forbes 400, a list of the wealthiest Americans, and filtered out the people who work within the tech field, or more specifically: IT.

So here they are, the 20 richest Americans in tech today.

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