Google’s new social network, Google+, is gaining users at a frenetic pace. Presumably people are signing up for it faster than any new social network in history.

There will be many who bemoan that there’s now yet another social network out there to keep track of. Weren’t there enough already? Don’t Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and all those other sites cover our social networking needs? “I don’t want another social network!”

But here’s the cool thing. The fact that Google+ has gotten some serious wind in its sails (unlike the dead-in-the-water duck that is Google Buzz) will bring something sorely needed to the social space: Competition.

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Microsoft is one of the largest and most profitable tech companies in the world, but sometimes we can’t help but feel a bit sorry for them.

Why? Because the online community won’t cut them any slack whatsoever. There is so little love shown that it’s scary. If there’s even the slightest chance that something can be blamed on Microsoft, it will.

Whatever the exact opposite of goodwill is, Microsoft has plenty of it.

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Twitter became what it is today largely thanks to a big and very enthusiastic community of third-party developers who built applications on top of the fast-growing service. There were other factors as well, but few would argue that strong support from its developer community hasn’t been key to Twitter’s success.

For developers, the Twitter API has been almost as hot a commodity as the Twitter service itself. So imagine our surprise when we noticed that worldwide interest in the Twitter API seems to have dropped off since mid-2010 (based on search statistics from Google).

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Although Facebook is by far the largest social network out there, the social network sphere is large and has a ton of players. We were curious about which of them are the most active. To find these sites, we decided to focus on the number of daily visitors to each site.

The number of (unique) daily visitors is an interesting metric since it doesn’t rely on registered users (who may or may not be active) or monthly visitors, where some may visit the site as seldom as once per month. In short, you get a good idea of the day-to-day activity on a site.

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During and after the earthquake and tsunami disaster in Japan this Friday, local phone networks became overloaded. Not just because of damage to infrastructure, but mainly because the networks simply couldn’t handle the flood of calls and text messages that followed.

This kind of overload is basically what happens around midnight at New Year’s Eve, only much worse, because everyone was worried about family and friends and wanted information as soon as possible.

Internet connections, however, continued to work for the most part, so people turned to social media instead.

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The Internet has given even small companies the chance to reach a huge audience worldwide. This has resulted in a number of companies and organizations that provide services to a huge number of users in spite of having a relatively small number of employees.

The companies and organizations we’ve included here have at least an estimated 10 million users or more.

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In what has become something of a yearly tradition, it’s now time for us to present 10 of the most noteworthy incidents on the Internet from this past year. As you’ll see, 2010 has been very interesting.

Just like previous years, we have included problems ranging from website outages and service issues to large-scale network interruptions. If you’re an avid Web user, you are bound to recognize several of them.

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Google is doing it. Facebook is doing it. Yahoo is doing it. Microsoft is doing it. And soon Twitter will be doing it.

We’re talking about the apparent need of every web service out there to add intermediate steps to sample what we click on before they send us on to our real destination. This has been going on for a long time and is slowly starting to build into something of a redirect hell on the Web.

And it has a price.

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Twitter announced yesterday that they now have more than 145 million registered users. That’s a lot, but how much is Twitter actually being used? Turns out that there’s more activity on Twitter than ever before, and it keeps increasing.

Twitter processed 2.64 billion tweets this August, an increase of 33% over May. Not a bad increase over just a summer. In August, an average of 85 million tweets passed through Twitter every day.

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That Twitter has been expanding well outside the borders of the United States is well known. It’s becoming a global social media phenomenon and much of its growth is currently coming from this international expansion. We thought it would be interesting to investigate where Twitter is growing the fastest right now.

By looking at traffic data to Twitter.com, we’ve identified several countries where Twitter is currently growing rapidly (this year). These are not necessarily countries that have a ton of Twitter users yet, but rather places where the traffic curve is pointing sharply upwards.

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