Remember netbooks, those underpowered but very small and inexpensive laptops? If ever anything came and went in a whirlwind, that’s the example to we’d point to. Netbook sales are now a mere shadow of their former glory.

To some extent, netbooks were probably hampered by the wave of lightweight laptops that started appearing a couple of years ago. They weren’t quite as small, but small enough, and much more powerful. What they weren’t, however, was cheap. In that way they could not supersede the netbook.

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Automattic’s WordPress.com blog hosting platform just keeps growing. Traffic is up 25% compared to a year ago, and 79% compared to the year before that. It hosts around half of all WordPress sites in the world (of which there are currently 54.7 million)

It’s easy to forget how it started, as a small service by the people behind the open source WordPress blog software. Here is Matt Mullenweg’s short announcement from back in November of 2005, when WordPress.com was opened up for everyone:

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The heyday of the iPod was a huge deal for Apple. For many people, it was the first Apple product they owned, and those who fell in love with it often went on to buy other Apple products. This was sometimes referred to as the iPod halo effect, and gave Apple a mass-market reach it had never had before. Without the iPod, Apple wouldn’t have been anywhere near as successful in the past decade.

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The Web has been abuzz about Pinterest for a while now. There is, shall we say, a great interest in Pinterest. So much interest, it turns out, that Pinterest in all likelihood is now getting more traffic than Tumblr in the United States. And if it isn’t, it soon will.

How did we come to this conclusion? We hit as many data sources as we possibly could and made a highly educated guess, and just so you don’t think we are making this up, we’ll take you through the process.

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We’re big fans of the JavaScript library jQuery, and it appears we are far from alone. As of June this year it’s used by 54.7% of the top 10,000 websites in the world. That’s a massive endorsement by the world’s web developers. It’s also a significant step forward from two years ago, when 28% of the sites used jQuery.

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Once users start abandoning a social network, like migrating birds, they leave in droves. Unlike birds, however, they don’t come back.

Case in point, the MySpace traffic graph at the top. In just three years, the former social network giant has gone from having north of 20 million daily visitors to around 2 million. In other words, the MySpace website has lost more than 90% of its visitors in that time.

To further illustrate this phenomenon, here are the traffic changes for three other formerly popular social networks from yesteryear.

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Websites are getting more dynamic, and more heavily scripted. JavaScript is going through something of a renaissance. Perhaps, however, it is time to start reigning in the amount of JavaScript code that’s included on the average web page.

Stats from HTTP Archive show an alarming trend.

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Don’t panic Ubuntu fans but your favorite desktop Linux distribution has fallen to fourth place in DistroWatch’s latest ranking.

Ubuntu has been overtaken by Fedora, Mint, and openSUSE. Mint now holds the number one spot in all of DistroWatch’s rankings going back at least a year, which leads us to wonder why.

One reason behind this reversal of fortune for Ubuntu could be the change of default interface in version 11.04 or “Natty Narwhal”, released in April 2011. With the new Ubuntu came Unity, an interface previously seen in Ubuntu Netbook Edition, and Gnome was relegated to an option.

There has been quite a bit of controversy surrounding Unity. Now it seems like Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, may be paying the price for the change. Let’s look at the numbers.

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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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Let’s see now. Where to begin? It’s been reported elsewhere that traffic to Google+ has dropped off by as much as 60% when compared to the huge boost the social network got in the days after it went public on September 20 (reportedly a 1,200% traffic boost). The basic problem now is that some are flinging this number around as some kind of proof that Google+ is doomed to fail and can’t retain users. So, time to for a reality check.

First of all, that Google+ would receive a huge but temporary boost around that time was a given. Remember this worldwide Google+ promo that Google ran on all its search pages, including Google.com?

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