Have you ever asked yourself, “what if?”

Today, the global distribution of Internet users doesn’t really reflect how the population is distributed in the real world. Many countries (and whole regions) are either over- or underrepresented. Internet penetration varies wildly between countries.

So let’s do a thought experiment. What would the Internet look like if all countries were on an equal footing in terms of Internet penetration? We’ll take the United States as a baseline, with 78% of its population being Internet users, a level many industrialized countries either match or exceed.

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The current big international social networks are Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and the newly formed Google+, and perhaps Tumblr, if you want to look at it as a social network. However, go back to around 2004-2005 and these were either not around yet, or just taking their early baby steps. Back then the big ones were Friendster, LiveJournal and MySpace.

And we’re talking in past tense, because oh how the mighty have fallen. Web users are a fickle bunch, and there is probably no market as trend sensitive as social networking.

How bad is it? As you’ll see, they’re all caught in a downward spiral, but they might have peaked later in life than you think.

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Our server infrastructure has a lot of work to do, it’s quite a busy bee. When you monitor the uptime and response time of as many websites and servers on the Internet as we do, and do it on a continuous basis, the numbers quickly add up. Just for fun, we thought we’d share some of these numbers with you.

First a couple of year-to-date numbers for the Pingdom monitoring network:

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Our server infrastructure has a lot of work to do, it’s quite a busy bee. When you monitor the uptime and response time of as many websites and servers on the Internet as we do, and do it on a continuous basis, the numbers quickly add up. Just for fun, we thought we’d share some of these numbers with you.

First a couple of year-to-date numbers for the Pingdom monitoring network.

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It’s always interesting when Google decides to push something on their main property, the Google search page. Considering how ubiquitous Google is, this is such a power move.

What we mean is that no other company can cast its net this wide by just modifying its home page. We all use Google. It’s like your TV remote suddenly coming alive and telling you that yeah, you should check out that Google+ thing.

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If you run a blog and happen to have one of those days when you just don’t feel appreciated, we know what will cheer you up. Go check your comment spam.

No, seriously.

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Apache has been the most widely used web server on the Internet since the early days of the Web. It still is. The second-most popular web server has been, and still is, Microsoft’s Internet Information Server, IIS. But Microsoft’s web server is now losing ground.

It wasn’t always like this. For quite some time, IIS was gaining ground on Apache, but the tide changed in 2007. Since then Apache has recovered much of its previous dominance, reaching a 65% market share, while the market share for IIS has dwindled below 16%, less than half of what it used to be. That’s a pretty steep drop, bringing the IIS market share back to what it was in 1997, 14 years ago.

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Back in June, Google+ landed with splash in the social network swimming pool, spraying water right in Facebook’s eyes. Judging by the mostly positive buzz so far, it’s arguably one of Google’s most successful product launches ever.

We know there are plenty of early adopters and techies on Google+, mostly males (the term “sausage fest” has been thrown around). But where has Google+ captured the imagination of people the most? Where are people the most interested in this new social network?

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We are in the middle of a new browser war, with Microsoft, Mozilla and Google all fighting for Web and HTML 5 supremacy. Ok, that was a bit dramatic, but there is some seriously intense competition going on right now.

With that in mind, you’d expect all three companies to do their utmost to get their latest and greatest web browsers on as many computers as possible. Google is doing that with Chrome. Mozilla is doing that with Firefox.

Microsoft is NOT doing that with Internet Explorer. Big emphasis on “not.”

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The growth of the microblogging platform Tumblr has been nothing short of amazing. The increase in users and overall attention the service is getting is reminiscent of when Twitter took off. There are now almost 28 million blogs on Tumblr. A year ago there were seven million.

As if that wasn’t impressive enough, Tumblr users will soon have cranked out a whopping 10 billion posts. That’s a huge milestone for Tumblr. At the current rate of more than 37 million posts per day, this should happen in about a week.

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