Did you ever wonder how busy the servers of the world’s largest social networks are? It turns out it’s very hard work being popular, especially for the number one player.

According to data from Google, Facebook serves 260 billion page views per month. That’s more than six million page views per minute, or a staggering 37.4 trillion page views in a year. We can safely assume that Facebook’s web servers aren’t getting bored waiting around for work to do.

No wonder Facebook needs as many as 30,000 servers, and they probably keep adding more and more. After all, they’re still growing.

Not that the web servers of other social networks are on a picnic, although they’re on a totally different playing field. A few samples:

• MySpace: 24 billion page views per month
• Twitter: 4.4 billion page views per month
• LinkedIn: 1.9 billion page views per month

If you ever had any doubts that Facebook is king of the hill, at least in terms of sheer site activity, have a look at the chart here below that we put together using data from Google Ad Planner. These are global numbers.

A few observations on scale:

• Facebook has almost 11 times as many monthly page views as MySpace, which came up second, and 59 times as many as Twitter.
• In turn, Twitter has more than twice as many monthly page views as LinkedIn.
• Digg has twice as many monthly page views as Reddit and more than seven times as many as Slashdot.
• Comparing the first and last on this list, Facebook has 5,778 times as many monthly page views as FriendFeed (which Facebook owns these days anyway).

There are of course plenty of other things that can keep servers busy other than serving web pages, for example streaming music or video, third-party data access via APIs (for example Twitter apps), etc.

Also, don’t get page views confused with actual visits or user numbers. Having more users makes it more likely that sites have many page views, but there are also other factors to consider, such the site design itself and the type of service it offers. Some sites encourage exploration more than others, clicking around to different pages. We’re going to have a closer look at this in a later post.

But for now, let’s just admire the incredible amount of work being done by these sites, every minute and hour of the day. Being popular in social media is hard work. No wonder people complain when social network sites have downtime, there are always a ton of people using them.

Note: As always when working with estimates (which Google and all other external data collection services do), there will be a margin of error in the numbers.

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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