This is a list of 14 of the largest social networks in the world, and how much downtime they have had so far in 2008.

As we mentioned in a recent report, Bebo’s downtime has increased significantly lately and has had by far the most downtime of the 14 social networks we monitored for this survey. More than 12 hours of downtime in less than two months is a lot, and it could possibly be caused by the new open application platform that Bebo launched in December, allowing third-party developers access to its platform, Facebook style. It could be putting more strain on Bebo’s systems than they anticipated.

The two giants in the field, MySpace (with 25 minutes of downtime) and Facebook (with one hour and 35 minutes of downtime), can both be considered to be within acceptable limits, especially MySpace.

Social networks, just like any other websites on the internet, will occasionally suffer from downtime, either planned or unplanned. However, social networks have a different type of usage than most websites, with frequent visits from the same user and many page views per visit. Therefore downtime can often be even more noticeable and frustrating to social network users.

A note about the monitoring: All monitoring was done using Pingdom’s uptime monitoring service. If a web page is not reachable, returns an error, or takes longer than 30 seconds to load, it is considered as down. Downtime is always confirmed from two geographically separate locations.

It may be the start of a new trend, software that automatically upgrades itself silently in the background without ever bothering users. Google has been doing it successfully with its Chrome web browser, and soon Mozilla will jump on the bandwagon with Firefox.

You may love it or hate it, but for most users, software that automatically upgrades itself can be a blessing, and in more ways than is immediately apparent.

And it’s not just great for users, it’s great for developers because it allows them to innovate and develop at a fast pace, pushing out frequent updates without annoying their users with upgrade notices. In short, automatic upgrades let developers push the pace of innovation.

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The two mobile platforms with the most apps are Google’s Android with around 95,000 apps, and Apple’s iOS with around 250,000 apps.

Those are impressive numbers, but this article isn’t about the sheer number of apps available. Instead, we wanted to focus on a very interesting distinction between the two platforms: The radical difference in the ratio between free and paid apps.

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Do you run a web service or hosting company? Do you like transparency? Then this might be of interest to you.

Service status blogs are becoming increasingly common these days and are usually very appreciated by users. Look no further than Twitter’s famous status blog, or the Google Apps status page. Status blogs (or “status pages”, depending on approach) may look and work differently, but they all serve the same purpose, informing users about service issues.

Now it’s easier than ever before if you want one, or want to make your existing status blog even better.

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From its official launch in October 2009, it took Windows 7 only nine months to pass Vista. Now the next question is when it will catch up with Windows XP. Because, unbelievable as it may seem, Windows XP still has a massive 55% of the desktop OS market. That is more than Windows 7 and Vista combined.

To figure out when Windows 7 will overtake XP, we have made a prediction based on the average market share changes over the past six months. It will give us an idea of what will happen if things continue at their current pace.

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Although the growth of Firefox has stagnated a bit lately due to the increasing competition from rival browsers, it’s still one of the biggest success stories in the history of the Internet and has the second-largest user base of any web browser.

Firefox has a widespread global user base, but we wanted to find out where it is most common, or another way of looking at it: how are the Firefox users distributed?

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