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How old is the average Twitter or Facebook user? What about all the other social network sites out there, like MySpace, LinkedIn, and so on? How is age distributed across the millions and millions of social network users out there?
To find out, we pulled together age statistics for 19 different social network sites, and crunched the numbers.
Some sites are utterly addictive. You return to them often, and when you do, you tend to stay there for a good while, visiting different pages, viewing interesting content. In a word, the site is engaging.
But how do you measure it? How do you put a number on how engaging a site is?
That is exactly what we are going to do in this post, and we will be looking at social network sites, arguably the most engaging sites out there.
Did you ever wonder how busy the servers of the world’s largest social networks are? It turns out it’s very hard work being popular, especially for the number one player.
According to data from Google, Facebook serves 260 billion page views per month. That’s more than six million page views per minute, or a staggering 37.4 trillion page views in a year. We can safely assume that Facebook’s web servers aren’t getting bored waiting around for work to do.
Have you ever wondered how many of Twitter’s users are women? Or men? What about Facebook, MySpace, Digg, LinkedIn, and other sites in the social media sphere?
We have tracked down this information for a number of social network sites (19 of them). All the major ones have been included, like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter and also some of the most popular social news sites; Digg, Reddit and Slashdot.
For those of you who use our Mr. Uptime Firefox extension, we just wanted to let you know that we have updated it for Firefox 3.5.
The update was submitted to Mozilla last Friday and is pending approval, but you can already download it directly from the Mr. Uptime website. (It’s free, as it always has been.)
For those of you who don’t know what Mr. Uptime is, it’s a Firefox extension from us here at Pingdom that will tell you when a broken website is working again.
You may remember the incident that Google had on January 31, when it during 55 minutes accidentally flagged all URL:s containing “/” as a potential malware site. This meant that every single site on the Internet was marked as harmful, including Google.com.
This is a look at some interesting side effects of that incident.
The ever-popular Slashdot was unreachable for over an hour last evening due to massive amounts of traffic hitting its network. Normally Slashdot is known for bringing other sites down with the traffic it generates (the so-called Slashdot effect, or slashdotting).
Yesterday a Twitter post (a tweet) by Mashable’s Pete Cashmore became so popular that traffic from Twitter crashed a blog. This sounds very similar to a common social media phenomenon originally known as the Slashdot effect (and later also the Digg effect), where a post on a popular social media site pushes more traffic than the target site can handle.
An interesting thing here is the mechanics of Twitter, which is fundamentally different from Digg and Slashdot. It’s not a social news site, with a front page that all visitors go to. We won’t go into the details of how Twitter works, that’s better covered elsewhere, but it’s worth noting that it’s a very different beast. It will be interesting times if Twitter is about to join the ranks of Slashdot and Digg as a potential “site crasher”.
For lack of a better word we will call the phenomenon of sites crashing as a result of traffic from Twitter, “the Twitter Effect”. (Or perhaps “the Tweet effect” would be catchier…?)
But now on to the big question: How could a single tweet generate that much traffic?
As Lifehacker noted yesterday, Mr Uptime is now (finally) available for Firefox 3. Mr Uptime for Firefox 2 proved to be highly popular, and we have received a lot of requests for an updated version for Firefox 3, so here it is!
For those of you not familiar with Mr Uptime, it’s a Firefox extension (from us here at Pingdom) that will make sure you don’t miss cool content online just because a website is temporarily down.
Digg has become synonymous with “social news”, but there are a number of other sites with similar concepts out there, many of them with their sights set on trying to remove Digg from the throne. We have looked at the traffic trends for 10 different social news sites to get an idea of how it is going for Digg and its competitors.
