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No wonder many bloggers have a hard time getting noticed. According to Blogpulse, there are more than 144 million blogs in the world, publishing 1 million posts per day. So there is some competition.
That’s an awful lot of hay for potential readers to sift through for that one single needle that your blog represents.
Thankfully, it’s not quite as bad as it looks.
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.
Last Friday we started our look into the history of computer messaging and which applications and services we have used to communicate over computer networks through the decades.
So far we have covered the time period from 1960 to 1990, i.e. the era before the birth of the World Wide Web that we live in today. Now it’s time to continue our journey through the history of computer messaging, from 1990 until today.
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.
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.
We all know which sites are popular today, but at one point they were new up-and-comers with an uncertain future. What was the buzz around these websites when they were just getting started? What was being said? We’ve done the digging so you can do the reading.
We looked for early mentions of YouTube, Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and Google in the press and blogosphere.
Few people take the plunge and turn that Web startup idea into reality, and making a viable business out of it is even harder.
That’s why we had this idea to sit down with people who have launched Web startups within the last couple of years and pick their brains. We’re hoping these little Web startup Q&A sessions will be both inspirational and interesting, and plan on making them somewhat of a series over the course of 2009.
First off is Allen Stern, who many know from his blog, CenterNetworks. He is the founder of CloudContacts, a Web startup that launched last year. Allen was kind enough to let us pick his brain about his startup and Web startups in general.
While we like to look forward, sometimes a trip down memory lane can be just as interesting. It doesn’t just give perspective on how far we have come, it also shows us the enormous potential for the future.
We’ve had our shares of retrospectives on this blog, and many of them have dealt with different aspects of how the Web has grown from being just a small project at CERN in the early 90s to the overwhelmingly popular place it is today.
You see them over and over again in blogs and news articles. Web buzzwords like The Cloud, Web 2.0, wiki, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, and so on. They have become part of our everyday vocabulary.
Have you ever wondered who actually came up with these words, and when? Where did they first show up?
Millions of people who blog don’t want to deal with hosting their blog themselves, so they use a blogging service instead. There are many things that factor into the choice of blogging service, but one of them should always be site reliability. After all, if people can’t access your blog, it won’t get read.
For this survey we have monitored the websites of nine blogging services for a period of four months to see how much downtime they have. The included services were Typepad, Blogger, Wordpress.com, Blogster, Blog.com, Vox, Squarespace, Windows Live Spaces and LiveJournal.
