The web browser market is an ever-changing landscape. It can sometimes be rocky ground for web designers and web developers trying to make their websites and services work for all the various browser versions available out there. It’s challenging work, to say the least.

That’s why it pays to be aware of what the web browser market looks like, and stay up to date. How many are using the various browsers out there? How many are using the latest versions? Which versions are the most common? How big an audience may you be annoying if your site isn’t perfect in a specific browser version?

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Twitter became what it is today largely thanks to a big and very enthusiastic community of third-party developers who built applications on top of the fast-growing service. There were other factors as well, but few would argue that strong support from its developer community hasn’t been key to Twitter’s success.

For developers, the Twitter API has been almost as hot a commodity as the Twitter service itself. So imagine our surprise when we noticed that worldwide interest in the Twitter API seems to have dropped off since mid-2010 (based on search statistics from Google).

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Things have been going so well with the new Pingdom REST API that we have decided to move forward and make it public. In fact, we made it public yesterday.

The new API will remain in beta for a few weeks just in case, but this is pretty much the final thing. It’s more of a release candidate than a beta.

The goal with this new API was to make it as powerful and flexible as possible, but still easy to use. It gives Pingdom users full access to their accounts via the API. The feedback we have received so far has been great.

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Big data has become one the new buzzwords on the Internet. It refers to the massive amounts of data that many modern web services deal with. This post will list some of the more useful software available to web developers for working with big data.

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We’ve been working on a brand new API for Pingdom and would now like to work together with a selection of beta testers to make sure it’s the best it can be before we release it into the wild.

This new API is part of a wave of backend development we’re doing here at Pingdom that will be the basis for taking our uptime monitoring service to new heights. We’re growing fast and have recently added several really talented developers to our team, and another hiring spree is coming up in a week or two for seven new positions. You will see a lot happening with Pingdom over the coming year.

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Android has received plenty of criticism for the way the platform has fragmented over time. Most complaints focus on there being so many different versions of Android out there in the hands of consumers, not to mention the different UI enhancements that different phone makers have added.

A fragmented platform is harder for developers to target and makes it difficult to create a consistent user experience, which of course is bad for end users.

But there’s another kind of fragmentation happening on Android as well.

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How fast are Internet connections across the world? How fast are they in your country?

This article examines the real-world connection speeds for people in the top 50 countries on the Internet, i.e. the countries with the most Internet users.

This list of countries ranges from China at number 1 with 420 million Internet users, and Denmark at number 50 with 4.75 million Internet users.

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You probably hate slow websites. So do we, and it’s pretty safe to say that it’s a universal rule.

There are a number of factors that can make a web page slow to load, both on the client side (the browser) and on the server side, but one really big factor is page size, and that’s what we’ll be talking about in this article. Hopefully you’ll pick up some useful information along the way.

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Yesterday, Apple announced that it will be launching an App Store for Mac OS X, modelled after the App Store for iPhone and iPad. It will be available 90 days from now and we believe it will be a game-changer for several reasons.

Why? Because it maps a very successful concept from the handheld world to the world of the personal computer (yes, the Mac is a PC…), and it translates very well.

Here is why it will be a success.

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Looks like the tide of the web API protocol war (if there ever was one) has shifted firmly in REST’s favor while SOAP has been forced back. Web developers have cast their votes, they want RESTful APIs.

Here is the distribution of the different API protocols and styles, comparing the situation in 2008 versus that of 2010, based on ProgrammableWeb’s directory of more than 2,000 web APIs.

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