Submarine communication cables are the carriers of nearly 100 percent of all the mails, tweets, pasta recipes and other digital communications across the oceans. They connect every continent except Antarctica.

We also find them to be chewy, entangling, fast, file-sharing and an achievement. In brief, we are fascinated by these high-powered garden hoses and we have compiled some interesting facts about them.

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Social networks are getting huge. So big, in fact, that many of them are competing in size with some of the largest countries in the world.

To give you (and us) a nice and visual overview of how today’s social networks stack up against countries in terms of sheer size, we have put together this chart.

Head on in to check it out!

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We just wanted to share the magnificent and very extremely important news that Pingdom now has more than 100 followers on Twitter (since yesterday).

A long way to go still (we started very recently), but it’s nevertheless a tiny little milestone that we thought might be fun to share with you. Baby steps.

Did we mention that you can follow us (the Pingdom team) on Twitter…?

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2009 looks set to be a break-through year for Twitter. This article will show that interest for Twitter is skyrocketing outside the US, and also where this is happening.

To be able to examine the worldwide buzz about Twitter (the general interest level per country, if you like) we have looked at Google search data for searches made so far in 2009. This gave us a fresh perspective on the current trends.

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Last week the BitTorrent site Mininova was hit by a large-scale DDoS attack that caused a total of 14 hours of downtime. Regardless of what you think about torrent sites, this was an interesting example of how a website can be incapacitated by a DDoS attack.

We chose this example to illustrate the effect of a DDoS attack because Mininova shared some relevant information about the attack, especially a very telling traffic graph from their Internet connection. This coupled with some Pingdom monitoring data gave us a chance to look closely at the effects of a DDoS attack.

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IPv6 adoption is going so slow that it has become a crisis in the making for the entire Internet. Three years from now there will be no IPv4 address space left. IPv6 needs to be fully adopted by then, but currently only 4% of the Internet supports IPv6.

This for a process that was expected to be done by 2007.

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Sooner or later, every site or application will fail. However the consequences depend not only on how the failure is managed but also on how it is communicated. Recently the web hosting company Media Temple and even Google have well illustrated how hard it is for modern connected organizations to respond quickly enough to system outages. Here’s a suggested crisis checklist and notes on the difficulties of always practicing it.

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Since it launched in 1998, Google has become one of the true giants of the Internet. These days, Google has data centers all around the world and hundreds of thousands of servers. The sheer size of Google today makes it very interesting to look back at its humble beginnings as a small research project called Backrub at Stanford University.

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