With the Internet growing rapidly over the years, the number of generic top-level domains (gTLDs) has increased from just a handful to about twenty, with many more proposed or in planning. Some, such as .com and .edu, have seen widespread adoption and are a useful contribution to the Internet. Others haven’t been quite as lucky. You could say they have flopped.

From domain extensions that never made it past the planning table, to those that make little sense at all, there are probably more flops than successes. Here are five of the worst TLD flops in Internet history (in no specific order).

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Most single serving websites are very gimmicky, like telling you you’re awesome, showing you how to spell “definitely”, or playing a fail sound. Some, however, are actually useful.

If you’re unfamiliar with the term, a single serving site is a one-page website with its own domain name that focuses on doing just ONE thing. These sites are by their very nature limited in scope, and that’s the whole point. They need to be dead simple to use, and most of the time they are just designed to answer a very specific question or perform a simple task.

Here are some of the more useful single serving websites we here at Pingdom have stumbled upon in our wanderings around the Web.

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They are unlikely to be compared in the first place, but when you start to think about it there are a LOT of things that Apple and Nintendo have in common.

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First of all, a big thank you to all our readers. We hope we have been able to provide you with interesting, fun and thought-provoking articles over the past year, and if you have discovered this blog recently, thank you for joining our ranks!

We have published more than 200 posts in 2008. Since we won’t be updating the blog until next Monday (December 29), here is a selection of our very best and most popular posts from 2008 to keep you entertained in the meantime.

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Sometimes bad things just happen, we all know that. And sometimes they happen to our loved ones (we’re talking about our computers here).

For the last five years the data recovery company Kroll Ontrack has been publishing a yearly list of strange ways people have broken their computers and/or hard drives. We here at Pingdom have gone through those press releases and handpicked the funniest and most bizarre incidents, for your reading pleasure.

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Google has so many different products that it becomes pretty hard to keep track of them over time. Some are worth being reminded of, though, because there are several useful Google products that are flying below the radar, unknown to the vast majority of users out there.

How do we know this? A couple of weeks ago we here at Pingdom wrote about Google’s tendency to keep many of its products in perpetual beta, and while doing the research for that post we kept finding Google products that we either didn’t know about or had forgotten that they existed.

So, we decided to share these with you.

This post lists 10 interesting Google products that you are likely to either have forgotten about or simply never knew existed.

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Ever since the iPhone launched here in Sweden we have been in love with it. Considering that we here at Pingdom deal with servers, networks and the Internet on a daily basis, we have evaluated a lot of iPhone apps aimed specifically at sysadmins and webmasters.

In our opinion, the iPhone can be extremely useful to administrators responsible for keeping servers, networks and websites up and running. Loaded with the right applications, it becomes an on-the-move toolbox for when work needs to be done but there’s no computer nearby.

This article lists 12 applications that will turn an iPhone into a veritable Swiss Army knife for any sysadmin, webmaster or network technician.

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Google owns a whole bunch of domain names other than the obvious ones like google.com, blogger.com and gmail.com. We here at Pingdom decided to find out which ones, with some truly surprising results. We only looked at .com domain names, and found thousands. Below are some of the more noteworthy .com domain names that Google [...]

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There are a lot of web hosting companies out there with unusual, strange, or just plain weird names (and URLs). We have collected some of the strangest ones in this post. The trashy www.InternetTrash.com (From their website: “The only place for trashy, tasteless, useless, politically incorrect, silly, stupid, meaningless, obnoxious, waste of bandwidth homepages! Normal [...]

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It seems that people are running web servers on basically any hardware they can get their hands on. This is a list of some very unconventional choices of web server hardware. Spud: Potato-powered web server Need we say more? Apparently they ran into problems with rotting potatoes. webACE – World’s smallest web server webACE claims [...]

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