Facebook passed MySpace in worldwide traffic a while ago, but MySpace has kept dominating the US market. Well, it looks like that is about to change really soon.

Within a month (or two at the most), if the current trend holds, Facebook will have more daily visitors than MySpace in the US according to Google Trends for Websites.

We have dug up a very telling graph, and also delve into some speculation about where Facebook is getting its users from.

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As you may have noticed if you’re a regular reader of this blog, we launched a new design last week. We hope you like it.

Aside from the general visual design change, there are some other new things as well…

For example, now you can write your own guest posts.

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On Monday, the US House of Representatives rejected a $700 billion emergency package for the US financial system. After the bill was rejected, the House website was so overwhelmed with visitors seeking information or wanting to email their representatives that the whole website effectively crashed.

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This post is about the desktop operating systems that fly under the radar of most people. We are definitely not talking about Windows, Mac OS X or Linux, or even BSD or Solaris. There are much less mainstream options out there for the OS-curious.

These alternative operating systems are usually developed either by enthusiasts or small companies (or both), and there are more of them than you might expect. There are even more than we have included in this article, though we think this is a good selection of the more interesting ones and we have focused specifically on desktop operating systems.

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Currently if you go to Cisco.com you will be greeted by a strange sight. It appears that all of the letters “t” have been removed from their text and source code. Not only does it make the text look funny but it has also changed the source code so no styles or scripts are working.

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On Monday, September 29, starting at 12:01 a.m. PST Microsoft will take Xbox Live offline for maintenance for up to 24 hours. The maintenance will affect Xbox Live and some parts of the xbox.com website.

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According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, a beta is “a nearly complete prototype of a product.” In other words, a not-yet-finished product.

Google is known for keeping their products in beta (much) longer than most other companies. But exactly how many of their products are in beta? When we here at Pingdom investigated this, it turned out that out of the 49 Google products we could find, 22 are in beta. That’s 45%!

Note that we didn’t include any Google Labs products since they can be considered to be a “playground” for future products. If we had included those, the percent of beta products would have been much higher (57%).

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On Tuesday (September 23), the rather infamous BitTorrent tracker The Pirate Bay was down for a continuous 3 hours and 11 minutes. The site went down at 2:44 p.m. CET (08:44 a.m. EDT).

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The site mytestbox.com has published a interesting article called Cloud computing, grid computing, utility computing – list of top providers.

It contains a good list of companies and information if you are researching cloud services.

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High Scalability recently posted a monster of an article with facts about how latency directly affects the bottom line of businesses on the Web, and best of all, plenty of advice on how websites can go about to reduce latency.

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