Twitter’s meteoric rise to fame has been hard to miss, especially after it really took off in 2009. The latest number being thrown around is that the service will soon have 18 million users in the United States alone.

We all know that Twitter is extremely popular in the United States, but it’s pretty darn popular in the rest of the world as well (Pingdom is on Twitter, and we’re Swedes!) But it took Twitter a while to get there.

Let’s take a tour of the geographic expansion of Twitter from its launch in 2006 until today in 2009.

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We hear mostly about the social networking sites where English is the predominant language, like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. But what about those sites where the vast majority of users don’t speak or use English? We don’t hear about those very much.

But that doesn’t mean they’re not out there. And many are doing extremely well. One of them is even big enough to rival Facebook in sheer user count.

The social networking sites we list below have reached an overwhelming popularity outside of the (native) English-speaking population, often being local hits in one or just a few countries and a specific language.

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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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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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LiveJournal was unavailable for 2 hours and 45 minutes yesterday, Tuesday, while the social network migrated to a new server facility.

The migration seems to have started just after 5 p.m. CET (11 a.m. US EST), which is when the site went down.

Directly following the migration, the website was significantly slower than normal for some time, something which was also explained as a side effect of the migration on the LiveJournal status page.

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This is a weekly recurring post about noteworthy incidents on the Internet. This includes for example general network issues, ISP problems and downtime for well-known websites. It may be things that have been detected by us here at Pingdom, or written about by others.

We are not going to be able to cover everything that happens out there, so if we omit anything that you feel is important, please feel free to add this information in the comments, preferably with a link to a source (such as a news article or service status page with relevant information).

This week it’s all about social networks: Trouble at Friendster, Twitter and LinkedIn.

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The social network site LinkedIn had two hour-long outages last week, one on Thursday and one on Sunday.

The first outage, on November 13 at 10:06 p.m. EST, lasted one hour and five minutes. According to a message displayed on the website the downtime was due to planned maintenance.

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The social network Friendster is having a bad couple of days. According to our monitoring, the Friendster website has been unavailable for a total of more than 18 hours since yesterday. As of this writing, the website is completely unreachable and has been so for more than six hours straight.

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