At the recent F8 conference Facebook revealed that they now have 800 million active users. Europe, with Russia included, has a population of 727 million. We now have a social network that is so large that it could fill up a major world region with people and still have some to spare (this “spare” being twice the size of Canada’s entire population).

Another cool comparison is that Facebook now has as many users as the entire Internet did back in 2004, the year Facebook was founded.

For fun, here are some other size comparisons you can make.

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We noticed an interesting thing the other day that we’d like to share with you. However, if you’re a Linux enthusiast, you may want to stop reading now…

These are the operating system stats for April for the United States.

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Have you ever wondered where in the world Macs are the most popular? We have, so we decided to find out.

To do this, we examined OS market share numbers from across the world to identify the countries where Mac OS X has the highest market share.

You’d expect the United States, Apple’s home market, to lead the pack, but it’s not quite that simple.

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It doesn’t feel like 2000 was all that long ago, does it? But on the Internet, a decade is a long time. Ten years ago we were in the era of the dot-com boom (and bust), the Web was strictly 1.0, and Google was just a baby.

Since then people have welled onto the Internet. You don’t actually realize how many more people are on the Internet now until you start comparing numbers. This article is an in-depth study of how the number of Internet users has grown in the past decade.

We’ll start with the whole world, then world regions, then break it down even further into countries. As you’ll see, a lot has happened.

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Although the growth of Firefox has stagnated a bit lately due to the increasing competition from rival browsers, it’s still one of the biggest success stories in the history of the Internet and has the second-largest user base of any web browser.

Firefox has a widespread global user base, but we wanted to find out where it is most common, or another way of looking at it: how are the Firefox users distributed?

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Facebook recently passed an incredible milestone, 500 million active users. And it keeps growing.

Although Facebook initially focused on the United States, it soon turned its eyes towards the horizon and the rest of the world. And it’s a tactic that’s been working extremely well. Facebook’s current user base is more than 1.6 times the size of the entire US population. If Facebook were a country, it’d be second only to China and India.

And speaking of countries… Now that it’s gone global, which countries have the most users on Facebook?

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The world isn’t a fair place, and yet another way this is laid bare is the huge differences shown in Internet penetration among the population of the various world regions. We thought it would be interesting to see what kind of an effect this is having on the world Internet population of today.

Read on for a set of very revealing statistics and charts . . .

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Microsoft’s new search engine Bing has been getting some serious buzz lately. We thought it would be interesting to see where in the world it’s been the most popular so far.

To get an idea of this, we used Google stats (oh, the irony) to see the popularity of the search term “Bing” in the last 30 days. Since it’s a pretty common word, we restricted our lookup to include only the “computers & electronics” category to get around this (in Google Insights for Search). No Sopranos references should have snuck in…

What we found was, at least to us here at the Pingdom office, a wee bit surprising.

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The Australian airline Jetstar suffered from an extended system outage on Sunday. The outage brought the check-in system offline, forcing Jetstar to switch to manual check-ins which caused significant delays for its passengers all over Australia.

According to Sky News, the outage lasted for about two-and-a-half hours, though it would take overnight work to fully restore the system and have everything on schedule Monday morning.

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How much you pay for your Apple Mac products depends greatly on where you live. This we already know, but how big that difference actually is may come as a shock to many. We looked at the prices in the United States, Europe and Australia and found some pretty substantial differences. Why do this comparison? [...]

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