Mobile Internet adoption and speeds are increasing across the world. Sweden is one example of a country where Internet connections – mobile as well as fixed – are plentiful and fast.

The Swedish Post and Telecom Authority (PTS) is in charge of monitoring the electronic communications and postal sectors in the country. In the latest report from PTS on telephony and the Internet, which covers the development through the the first half of 2011, we found some nuggets of information in terms of mobile data subscribers and traffic we felt worthy of a comparison to what’s happening globally.

These numbers should also be a good indication of how rapidly mobile Internet use is ramping up in other, similar countries (for example the rest of Scandinavia).

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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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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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Although Facebook is by far the largest social network out there, the social network sphere is large and has a ton of players. We were curious about which of them are the most active. To find these sites, we decided to focus on the number of daily visitors to each site.

The number of (unique) daily visitors is an interesting metric since it doesn’t rely on registered users (who may or may not be active) or monthly visitors, where some may visit the site as seldom as once per month. In short, you get a good idea of the day-to-day activity on a site.

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Pardon the wordplay on “dog-eat-dog world,” but as you’ll see it applies perfectly to what is going on with Windows in the desktop OS space.

Because there are several interesting things going on. Some quite expected, others not so much.

First of all, the situation now is that Windows 7 has made a real splash. It’s already passed Windows Vista and is getting closer and closer to that clunky old workhorse that refuses to die, Windows XP.

This is how the different versions of Windows were divided one year ago, versus now…

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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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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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Linux has been around for almost two decades now. It has become a resounding success as a server OS (for example as the L in the famous LAMP stack), and more recently as a mobile OS (Android). But what about on the desktop?

Linux enthusiasts have been predicting the rise of Linux as a desktop OS for the better part of a decade. To name just one of many examples, in 2003, Siemens Business Systems predicted that Linux would have captured 20% of the desktop market by 2008.

Well, it’s now 2010, and desktop Linux isn’t even close to 20%. Or one tenth of that.

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The .com top-level domain has dominated the Internet pretty much from the start, and that’s still the case. But how strong is this dominance? After all, there are now approximately 200 million registered domain names, and less than half of those are .coms.

To find out what the current situation looks like for actual, popular websites, we’ve looked at this from two different perspectives:

• The top 10,000 websites in the world.
• The top 10,000 websites in the United States.

This article will show you the distribution of top-level domains (TLDs) among these top websites to show you how widely used .com is today, and how the other top-level domains are doing by comparison.

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That Twitter has been expanding well outside the borders of the United States is well known. It’s becoming a global social media phenomenon and much of its growth is currently coming from this international expansion. We thought it would be interesting to investigate where Twitter is growing the fastest right now.

By looking at traffic data to Twitter.com, we’ve identified several countries where Twitter is currently growing rapidly (this year). These are not necessarily countries that have a ton of Twitter users yet, but rather places where the traffic curve is pointing sharply upwards.

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