Facebook recently passed an incredible milestone, 500 million active users. And it keeps growing.

Although Facebook initially focused on the United States, it soon turned its eyes towards the horizon and the rest of the world. And it’s a tactic that’s been working extremely well. Facebook’s current user base is more than 1.6 times the size of the entire US population. If Facebook were a country, it’d be second only to China and India.

And speaking of countries… Now that it’s gone global, which countries have the most users on Facebook?

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The world is a big place, but so is the Internet. We know which countries are the largest in the real world, but what about on the Internet?

This article examines which countries are the largest in terms of Internet users, and will also look into their growth potential. That last point is very interesting to look at, because it’s an indication of how the power balance on the Internet might shift in the future.

But before we head on to the charts, let’s start with a few interesting findings.

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The .com top-level domain has dominated the Internet pretty much from the start, and that’s still the case. But how strong is this dominance? After all, there are now approximately 200 million registered domain names, and less than half of those are .coms.

To find out what the current situation looks like for actual, popular websites, we’ve looked at this from two different perspectives:

• The top 10,000 websites in the world.
• The top 10,000 websites in the United States.

This article will show you the distribution of top-level domains (TLDs) among these top websites to show you how widely used .com is today, and how the other top-level domains are doing by comparison.

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The iPad has made a huge splash in a very short time, and this in spite of only being available in the United States. Now that its release in other countries is getting closer every day, where is anticipation the hottest? Which countries are the most interested in the iPad?

This is one area where Google can come to the rescue of Apple (something we haven’t seen much of lately). Google Insights for Search can show the “regional interest” for various terms. When a brand name is involved, like the iPad, it becomes very useful since it will be same all over the world and will reflect interest in that brand or product. We used this tool to research the overall global interest in the iPad, and also where in the United States it’s most popular.

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The tech industry is littered with billionaires. We all enjoy a good income, but some clearly have earned more than others. Much, much more. The question is, how much money do the really big names in tech actually have?

To find out, we went through the Forbes 400, a list of the wealthiest Americans, and filtered out the people who work within the tech field, or more specifically: IT.

So here they are, the 20 richest Americans in tech today.

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There’s been talk about Twitter being the “pulse of the web”, and there is no doubt that the real-time web and real-time search are burning hot trends. At the heart of Twitter are its status messages, more commonly known as tweets, where people express opinions, share links and let people know what they are doing. Tweets are like the vital red blood cells in Twitter’s stream of information.

So how many tweets are pulsing through Twitter every day? When do we tweet the most? Read on to find out.

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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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If you suddenly find yourself without an Internet connection, there’s a good chance that somewhere a team of construction workers just uttered a collective “uh-oh” because their backhoe dug up a telecom cable. Oops.

It turns out that this problem is so common that it is costing millions upon millions of dollars in repairs every year. Backhoes, drilling and digging are serious cable killers.

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How long have today’s most popular websites been around? This is a survey of when today’s top 50 websites began their lives.

What we here at Pingdom wanted to discover when we made this survey was not just how old the most popular sites are, but to see if we could discover any interesting trends based on that, and we think we did.

For the extra curious we’ve also included a table with the individual launch years for all of the top websites at the bottom of the article.

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Microsoft’s new search engine Bing has been getting some serious buzz lately. We thought it would be interesting to see where in the world it’s been the most popular so far.

To get an idea of this, we used Google stats (oh, the irony) to see the popularity of the search term “Bing” in the last 30 days. Since it’s a pretty common word, we restricted our lookup to include only the “computers & electronics” category to get around this (in Google Insights for Search). No Sopranos references should have snuck in…

What we found was, at least to us here at the Pingdom office, a wee bit surprising.

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