Over the past year, web pages have on average become 25% bigger. We’re not talking about dimensions here, but download size. Based on the top 1,000 websites on the Internet, the average page size has gone from 626 kB to 784 kB.

A 25% size increase in just one year is rather drastic. With that kind of growth, the average web page will be 980 kB in just a year (amost 1 MB!). In five years, a page will be almost 2.4 MB. And that’s just an average, many pages will be significantly larger.

What is behind this exploding growth? Let’s find out.

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There should be no doubt in anyone’s mind that Apple’s iPad is the biggest seller in the tablet space, but we have seen many iPad competitors come out over recent months, including Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, Blackberry PlayBook, Amazon Kindle Fire, and many more.

However, despite all these Android tablets, according to comScore in October 2011, 95.5% of all tablet web traffic in the U.S. comes from iPad.

That is a stunning number. So, is anyone really buying all these shipping Android tablets, and what do people do with them after they buy them? Because they don’t seem to be surfing the Web.

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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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Online social networks are everywhere these days, a truly global phenomenon. But where are the different social networks having the most success in terms of popularity? That is what we’ll try to answer in this post.

We have included 11 social networks in this survey: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Orkut, Tumblr, FourSquare, MySpace, LiveJournal, Hi5 and Bebo.

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In October, Windows 7 usage has for the first time surpassed Windows XP usage globally according to statistics from StatCounter. In other words, Windows 7 just became the most widely used desktop OS in the world.

This has been a long time coming. Windows XP has been at the top for eons (it launched 10 years ago, and once established, didn’t let go). Windows Vista never managed to threaten XP, so it wasn’t until Windows 7 came around that a shift really started to happen.

And that shift has happened fast. Windows 7 launched in October of 2009, then…

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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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Have you ever asked yourself, “what if?”

Today, the global distribution of Internet users doesn’t really reflect how the population is distributed in the real world. Many countries (and whole regions) are either over- or underrepresented. Internet penetration varies wildly between countries.

So let’s do a thought experiment. What would the Internet look like if all countries were on an equal footing in terms of Internet penetration? We’ll take the United States as a baseline, with 78% of its population being Internet users, a level many industrialized countries either match or exceed.

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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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In just a couple of years, Google Chrome has firmly established itself as a web browser to be reckoned with. Where once you spoke of Internet Explorer and Firefox as the two big ones, these days the duo has become a trio. The browser wars are back. Chrome has started to edge out Firefox in some countries, and as you will see in this article, there are actually countries where it’s already become number one.

This is where South America comes into the picture. Nowhere is Chrome more successful than in that part of the world.

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When you research web browser statistics and trends, one thing soon becomes clear: Google Chrome is on a tear. It’s gaining users, fast. In less than three years, it has claimed more than 20% of the global web browser market and is without a doubt one of Google’s biggest success stories so far.

And the really amazing thing is that at the current rate, Chrome will overtake both Firefox and IE within a year and become the world’s most widely used web browser.

Yes, you read that right. We’ll soon explain how we got to that conclusion. (If you’re the impatient kind, scroll down to the second chart.)

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