Twitter is a great place to find out what’s going on “right now”, and the Swine Flu situation is no exception. As of this writing, half of the trending topics on Twitter are related to the Swine Flu (or “H1N1″ as it’s also called).

With real-time services that facilitate communication in the way Twitter does, are we about to enter an era where we can stay informed to a much higher degree and therefore be able to minimize the ill effects of things such as the Swine Flu?

In short, will Twitter help counter the Swine Flu pandemic?

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Millions of people who blog don’t want to deal with hosting their blog themselves, so they use a blogging service instead. There are many things that factor into the choice of blogging service, but one of them should always be site reliability. After all, if people can’t access your blog, it won’t get read.

For this survey we have monitored the websites of nine blogging services for a period of four months to see how much downtime they have. The included services were Typepad, Blogger, Wordpress.com, Blogster, Blog.com, Vox, Squarespace, Windows Live Spaces and LiveJournal.

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Social networks are getting huge. So big, in fact, that many of them are competing in size with some of the largest countries in the world.

To give you (and us) a nice and visual overview of how today’s social networks stack up against countries in terms of sheer size, we have put together this chart.

Head on in to check it out!

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2009 looks set to be a break-through year for Twitter. This article will show that interest for Twitter is skyrocketing outside the US, and also where this is happening.

To be able to examine the worldwide buzz about Twitter (the general interest level per country, if you like) we have looked at Google search data for searches made so far in 2009. This gave us a fresh perspective on the current trends.

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Yesterday we released a big, brand new report about social network site uptime in 2008.

Included in the report are Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter, Friendster, LiveJournal, Orkut, Bebo, Hi5, Windows Live Spaces, Last.fm, Classmates.com, Reunion.com, Xanga and Imeem.

The full report is available as a free PDF, but we have lifted out some interesting data from the report here below.

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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?

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Both the video-sharing site Revver and the personalized start page service Pageflakes have been down since last Thursday, January 29. As of this writing, that is more than three-and-a-half days of straight downtime.

Our monitoring shows that both sites went offline soon after 9 p.m. CET (3 p.m. US EST).

The connection between the two? Both are owned by Live Universe, whose site is also unavailable.

The outage is apparently not supposed to be permanent, but something has definitely gone very wrong. Last Friday Live Universe told CNET that the sites would be back within a few hours.

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The video-sharing site Revver has been having some major stability problems for a while now.

On November 1, Revver told TechCrunch that they were migrating to a new service provider:

Greenspan checked in and says they are in the middle of major migration from a CDN/provider to a tier 1 & top technology provider which “should make the quality of Revver videos displayed better then ever” (could take a few days).

The question is how well that migration has gone.

Our monitoring reveals that in the past month, the Revver website has been unavailable for a total of almost 24 hours. In just the last week, it has been down for more than 6 hours (including a 5-hour outage on January 17).

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We all know that Wordpress is popular among bloggers, and Movable Type as well. But HOW popular? And what other platforms are being used? To find out, we went through the Technorati top 100 blogs and investigated what blog platforms they are using. It turned out to be a highly interesting survey with plenty of surprises along the way.

As a by-product we also found out some interesting things about the more popular blog networks. For example, did you know that Weblogs, Inc. and Gawker Media together have 22 of the top 100 blogs?

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Remember “social search”? There has been plenty of buzz around this term in the past couple of years, but here’s a super-quick reminder from Wikipedia if you’re fuzzy on the details:

Social search or a social search engine is a type of web search method that determines the relevance of search results by considering the interactions or contributions of users.

Sounds like a smart way to at least complement more traditional approaches to Web search, and we are sure it has a future. There are plenty of services vying for a place in this space, such as Mahalo and Wikia Search. However, while we were doing research about Web terminology trends last week, we stumbled upon this very interesting little nugget:

Social search seems to be strictly a US phenomenon, at least judging by Google search statistics.

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