A new year has arrived, and we here at Pingdom have dived headlong into it. For example, just last week we launched a new iPhone app that can be used to access our uptime monitoring service.

And while 2009 promises to be a great year for us, we certainly can’t complain about 2008. In fact, 2008 has been a very good year for us.

In 2008 we have:

• Nearly doubled our customer base.
• Nearly tripled the number of sites we monitor.

At the end of 2008, Pingdom was monitoring the uptime of 34,353 sites.

Judging by the feedback we have been getting from people around the Web, people are finding the service highly useful and often something of a lifesaver.

One of the main benefits of using Pingdom is that you can be alerted of site problems, and there has been a significant amount of alerting going on in 2008. We sent out:

• 4,872,832 email alerts (yep, almost 5 million)
• 448,584 SMS alerts

Ok, enough chest beating.

We’re truly looking forward to what 2009 will bring, and we promise you that we will be working hard to make the Pingdom uptime monitoring service even better and more useful.

And finally, a BIG THANK YOU to all our great customers! Without you, we wouldn’t be anywhere.

Do you live in a country that loves Apple’s iPad? Most of us probably think we do, but we wanted to be able to tell you for sure. So even though we have written about the iPad many times before, it’s now time for us to tackle this hotly contested topic again.

Read on to find out, which countries are the most iPad-friendly.

Perhaps you live in one of them.

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Display resolutions are increasing every year, something that’s being taken to its extreme with the recent “retina display” trend that came with the latest iPad. The jump in onscreen pixels is massive, and such displays are soon bound to make their way into regular laptops and desktop displays, perhaps as soon as this year.

This development will have a profound effect on the size of the graphics resources necessary for websites, which ultimately will make websites bigger, more bloated and slower to download. That is, if we don’t change tactics.

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The juggernaut that is Facebook is quickly approaching 1 billion users, so the social network is growing at a rapid pace overall.

But if we look at some of the latest figures available, it would seem that Zuckerberg’s creation is not gaining users in every corner of the world.

In fact, in one country, Facebook has lost 16% of its users over the last six months, the equivalent of over 200,000 users. But in another country, Facebook has gained almost 17 million users over the same period.

What countries are we talking about, you ask? Read on and we’ll tell you.

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Developers who want a portable computer to code on, which is thin, light, sleek and yet powerful, may now be getting another option in an ultrabook from Dell. What makes the “Sputnik” ultrabook different is that it runs Ubuntu 12.04 Linux and it’s tailor-made for developers.

Every Friday we bring you a collection of links to places on the web that we find particularly newsworthy, interesting, entertaining, and topical. We try to focus on some particular area or topic each week, but in general we will cover Internet, web development, networking, performance, security, and other geeky topics.

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“Photograph what is close to you. Share it with the world!“ That’s one of the headlines on Aday.org, a global project that will attempt to document what goes around the world in one day.

This all takes place on Tuesday May 15, 2012, and Pingdom will be participating.

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