The launch of the social news site Digg in 2004 was the perfect example of a good idea at the right time. That was the year the term “Web 2.0″ started being thrown about to describe the rise of new web technologies that allowed for more interactive sites, and an increased focus on user collaboration. Back then, the notion of a news site that was driven almost entirely by users was completely new and innovative, and Digg quickly rose in popularity. It sparked the rise of many similar social news sites, and was also the beginning of founder Kevin Rose’s move from television personality to web entrepreneur.

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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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Facebook claims to have Twitter “in the rear-view mirror,” but of course the company is keeping a close eye on what’s happening with Twitter. The recent inclusion of Twitter-style tagging with the @-symbol in Facebook certainly seems more than a little inspired by Twitter.

There is one thing we find a wee bit strange, though. Although we love Twitter and the service is clearly growing like crazy, the way people are talking about Twitter and Facebook often makes it sound like Twitter may overtake Facebook any day now. Those people need to realize how big Facebook really is.

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Pingdom’s Web service is currently the featured API at Programmable Web, an excellent resource covering all aspects of Web services and mash-up applications. The Pingdom Web service API allows our customers to access all their monitoring data from Pingdom, for example the latest downtimes of their servers or websites, historical data, response times, raw check [...]

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The term “mash-up” goes hand in hand with Web 2.0. It refers to a website that combines content from several different sources and mashes it up into something new. Google, Yahoo, eBay, Amazon, and many others are providing access to their data through Web service APIs. The upside is obvious. Being able to pull in [...]

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YouTube has around 20 million unique visitors every month, and thousands of blogs and websites link to YouTube videos. They serve more than 100 million videos per day, and more than 65,000 videos are uploaded daily. As a small metric of how popular YouTube has become in little over a year, according to Alexa data, [...]

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