Posted in
Main on September 15th, 2009 by Pingdom
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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Posted in
Main on September 14th, 2009 by Pingdom
Comscore has released some interesting statistics about the US traffic to the business-oriented social networking site LinkedIn. According to Comscore, LinkedIn had 8 million US visitors in July this year, an increase of 66% compared to a year ago.
But the really interesting part was some data extraction about the kind of visitors that LinkedIn is getting. By cross-referencing visits to job-seeking sites with visits to LinkedIn, Comscore was able to estimate of how many of LinkedIn’s visitors are job seekers (and even to what degree those visitors are looking for a job).
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Posted in
Main on June 23rd, 2009 by Pingdom
URL shortening services have been around for a long time (TinyURL started back in 2002) but it wasn’t until Twitter started gaining momentum that they became widely popular. Now we have a TON of them, including the original TinyURL, Bit.ly, Is.gd, and many, many more.
We have all placed an enormous amount of trust in these services by using them to such a large extent. They offer a legitimate, highly useful service, but we should at least be aware of the flip side of the coin.
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Posted in
Main on February 18th, 2009 by Pingdom
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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Posted in
Main on February 3rd, 2009 by Pingdom
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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Posted in
Main on October 10th, 2008 by Pingdom
LinkedIn, the popular social network for professionals, has had several periods of downtime lately. The last one came last evening (US time), and lasted just over an hour.
The website’s recurring availability issues are making us wonder if LinkedIn has perhaps started to run into scaling issues. According to their website, LinkedIn currently has more than 25 million users, compared to 14 million a year ago. That’s almost a doubling of their user base in just a year.
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