Twitter announced yesterday that they now have more than 145 million registered users. That’s a lot, but how much is Twitter actually being used? Turns out that there’s more activity on Twitter than ever before, and it keeps increasing.

Twitter processed 2.64 billion tweets this August, an increase of 33% over May. Not a bad increase over just a summer. In August, an average of 85 million tweets passed through Twitter every day.

And if you look at the whole year so far, the increase is even more impressive. Activity on Twitter has already more than doubled this year (August had 115% more tweets than January).

Note that the above chart shows the total activity on Twitter, both Twitter.com and tweets sent via Twitter’s API, i.e. from all Twitter apps.

Last year was a breakout year for the service, and that trend seems to continue.

It’s a luxury problem, but this rapid growth of course puts a lot of strain in Twitter’s infrastructure (they’ve had their hands full). No wonder Twitter is moving into its own custom data center this fall.

About the data: If you’re curious how we calculated the number of tweets per month, check out this post, the methodology is listed at the bottom.

An investment in Apple stock 10 years ago would be worth 47 times as much today. An investment in Amazon would have given you 14 times your money back. Not a bad way to spend some dollars in 2002.

Those are far from the only stocks that would have given huge returns over a 10-year time span, though. Other notable mentions include Akamai and Red Hat, both returning more than 10 times the money over the past 10 years.

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Have you felt the effects of BYOD in your company? Chances are, you and your colleagues want to Bring Your Own Devices to the office and use instead of, or in addition to, the equipment the company has issued. But BYOD arguably has immense implications in terms of security and many other areas.

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Just a couple of weeks ago we reported that South Korea has the fastest average Internet connection speed in the world, reaching 17.5 Mbps in the latest report by Akamai, covering Q4 2011.

Now we take a look at where in the world Internet speeds have grown the fastest over the last four and a half years. It may surprise you, which countries actually made it onto the list.

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Lately there’s been a tremendous amount of hype about the potential of an “Instagram for video” as the next big thing. However, there’s a fundamental problem that stands in the way of that. For lack of a better word, it’s the problem of scannability (yes, that’s probably a brand new word…).

Twitter can be scanned quickly. Tweets are bite-sized and take mere seconds for users to process. Instagram is pretty much Twitter for images, where entries can also be scanned in mere seconds. Sometimes it doesn’t even take that long.

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Admit it, you have an iPad! And you lug it around with you in the data center, when checking your servers, when troubleshooting, and all the time, really.

Simply, we know many sysadmins use iPads (and other types of tablets as well) in the daily work. So, to inspire you, we have tested a bunch of apps for iPad that we think you will find interesting.

After a rigorous selection-process (and input from our Twitter followers), we can now present to you 10 great iPad apps for sysadmins.

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