This week, Spotify announced that it’s reached a big milestone: One million paying subscribers (out of a total of nearly 7 million active users). With this, it’s the largest music subscription service outside of Asia (apparently a South Korean service called Melon holds the top spot, according to FT.com).

That becomes even more impressive if you take into account that Spotify only launched two years ago and is available in just seven countries: the United Kingdom, Sweden (Spotify was founded by Swedes), Norway, Finland, France, Spain and the Netherlands.

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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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In July we had a look at the worldwide state of the Internet. Now the time has come for something a bit more specific, the state of the Internet in Europe. We’ll look at this from two angles. First, which countries in Europe have the most Internet users, and second, which countries have the highest Internet penetration. Both are relevant in their own right.

Since Europe is such a diverse market with a multitude of countries and different languages, it makes sense to look at these countries separately. This contrary to the trend where people sometimes try to think of the European Union (much of, but not all of, Europe) as some kind of equivalent of the United States. The language issue alone makes the comparison moot.

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Last year, Google bought an old paper mill in Finland. Now the company is in process of converting that paper mill into a major data center. Construction is already well underway, and the data center is expected to go live next spring. It will be Google’s first dedicated data center in the Nordic countries, with several interesting innovations, for example being cooled entirely by sea water.

Swedish magazine Computer Sweden was recently on location in Finland and has published an article (in Swedish) with new information and pictures from the build. We’ve summarized the important parts of that article and also what other information we could find around the Web, mostly from Finnish newspaper articles.

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There’s been talk about Twitter being the “pulse of the web”, and there is no doubt that the real-time web and real-time search are burning hot trends. At the heart of Twitter are its status messages, more commonly known as tweets, where people express opinions, share links and let people know what they are doing. Tweets are like the vital red blood cells in Twitter’s stream of information.

So how many tweets are pulsing through Twitter every day? When do we tweet the most? Read on to find out.

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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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Considering the massive amount of websites that are using Google Analytics it is of course extremely important that the Google Analytics script is always available and responding well so that website visitors will have no problems loading it.

We use Google Analytics ourselves here at Pingdom and think it’s a great tool for keeping track of our visitor traffic. Since we have included the GA script on both our main website and our blog, we were curious to see how well it performs and how reliable it is (uptime wise).

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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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Ping is the favorite tool of network administrators for testing connectivity and response time over networks, but is there a limit to how fast response times can get? Of course there is. The answer is c. Ultimately response time over a network is limited by the speed of light. In a vacuum, light travels with [...]

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