The United States may be overtaken by China as the world’s largest smartphone market this year, but it’s nevertheless a huge and highly influential market. According to Comscore, more than 100 million Americans now own a smartphone, a number that keeps growing.

We thought it would be interesting to take a closer look at the state of the US smartphone market. Where is it, and what are the trends? As you’ll see, things have changed dramatically in very little time.

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.

That’s quite a mix, isn’t it? Ruby, Linux, Turing, and Windows 8. But there’s even more: Jira, HyperCard, and Flamer, as well. We take a slightly different approach this week and bring you a wild mix of interesting reading on various topics from around the interwebs. Hopefully you’ll enjoy this eclectic mix while you enjoy your weekend.

Every Friday we bring you a collection of links to places on the web that we find particularly newsworthy, interesting, entertaining, and topical. We try to focus on some particular area or topic each week, but in general we will cover Internet, web development, networking, performance, security, and other geeky topics.

Technology moves at a rapid pace and looking back at reviews from many years ago may seem like a crazy idea. However, we dug up some pretty ancient copies of BYTE Magazine to take a look at what reviewers thought about new computers and other pieces of tech some 20, 30, or even more years ago.

By no means do we mean to pick at or make fun of these pieces of tech or the writers of the articles, but we also can’t help finding them very funny.

Have you ever wondered which tech companies are the most valuable in the world? We have, so we decided to find out.

We looked at the market capitalization, i.e. the total value of all shares in each company. Since the data source we used was Google Finance, we got all companies in the technology sector that are traded in the United States, which also includes many of the larger non-US companies. In other words, this list is pretty close to a worldwide top 20.

In Finland, almost 8% of mobile web browsing is done on Windows Phone devices.

That makes Finland the number one country for Windows Phone. In contrast, Microsoft’s smartphone OS only has 0.53% of the worldwide mobile web traffic.

But which country is number two and how far behind Finland is it?

An investment in Apple stock 10 years ago would be worth 47 times as much today. An investment in Amazon would have given you 14 times your money back. Not a bad way to spend some dollars in 2002.

Those are far from the only stocks that would have given huge returns over a 10-year time span, though. Other notable mentions include Akamai and Red Hat, both returning more than 10 times the money over the past 10 years.

Just a couple of weeks ago we reported that South Korea has the fastest average Internet connection speed in the world, reaching 17.5 Mbps in the latest report by Akamai, covering Q4 2011.

Now we take a look at where in the world Internet speeds have grown the fastest over the last four and a half years. It may surprise you, which countries actually made it onto the list.

Lately there’s been a tremendous amount of hype about the potential of an “Instagram for video” as the next big thing. However, there’s a fundamental problem that stands in the way of that. For lack of a better word, it’s the problem of scannability (yes, that’s probably a brand new word…).

Twitter can be scanned quickly. Tweets are bite-sized and take mere seconds for users to process. Instagram is pretty much Twitter for images, where entries can also be scanned in mere seconds. Sometimes it doesn’t even take that long.

Admit it, you have an iPad! And you lug it around with you in the data center, when checking your servers, when troubleshooting, and all the time, really.

Simply, we know many sysadmins use iPads (and other types of tablets as well) in the daily work. So, to inspire you, we have tested a bunch of apps for iPad that we think you will find interesting.

After a rigorous selection-process (and input from our Twitter followers), we can now present to you 10 great iPad apps for sysadmins.

If you list the top 100 sites in the world (according to Alexa), you’ll find that 23 are owned by Google. That’s a massive share for a single company.

How does Google have such a huge presence? The main reason is the large number of localized versions of Google Search, such as Google.com, Google.co.uk, Google.fr, Google.de, etc. Almost every country has one, and due to their popularity, 17 are among the top 100 most visited sites on the Internet.

We have analyzed the top 10,000 websites in the world to find out what web server software they are running. Here is what we found out.

First of all, it is clear that open source software rules the roster. This largely thanks to two massively popular open source projects: The Apache web server, and the nginx web server. Together they account for at least 61% of the top 10k sites.

May 22 is the birthday of Ethernet, a family of computer networking technologies for local area networks (LANs). It was on this day in 1973 that Robert Metcalfe submitted a memo that detailed how the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), where he worked, should connect its personal computers to a shared printer.

It would be easy for us to borrow a phrase from Steve Jobs and ask you: “Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life? Or do you want to come with me and change the world?” And the thing is, we’d be very serious about it. Chances are you don’t sell sugared water, but the essence of the question is still valid: do you want to join Pingdom and change the world?

Because, you see, we believe this with passion, that we’re building some of the best online services anywhere, which are used by individuals and businesses in all four corners of the world.  Our quest is to make the web a faster and safer place for all, and we need the best people to join us to make that a reality.

Earlier this week we studied what countries around the world had lost and gained the most Facebook users over the past 6 months. With Facebook going public today, we thought we’d take a quick look at where the social network has the greatest potential for growth.

So we posed this question: what if Facebook had the same penetration in Africa and Asia as it does in Europe and North America? How many users would the social network have then?

The numbers are pretty staggering.

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.

Do you live in a country that loves Apple’s iPad? Most of us probably think we do, but we wanted to be able to tell you for sure. So even though we have written about the iPad many times before, it’s now time for us to tackle this hotly contested topic again.

Read on to find out, which countries are the most iPad-friendly.

Perhaps you live in one of them.

Display resolutions are increasing every year, something that’s being taken to its extreme with the recent “retina display” trend that came with the latest iPad. The jump in onscreen pixels is massive, and such displays are soon bound to make their way into regular laptops and desktop displays, perhaps as soon as this year.

This development will have a profound effect on the size of the graphics resources necessary for websites, which ultimately will make websites bigger, more bloated and slower to download. That is, if we don’t change tactics.

Just last week we had the great pleasure of welcoming a new developer to Pingdom, and now it’s time for another one.

Filip Salomonsson has become one of us in the Pingdom team, bringing his considerable skills in coding, linguistics, and many other areas, to an already very diverse, creative, and dynamic group of kickass devs.

The juggernaut that is Facebook is quickly approaching 1 billion users, so the social network is growing at a rapid pace overall.

But if we look at some of the latest figures available, it would seem that Zuckerberg’s creation is not gaining users in every corner of the world.

In fact, in one country, Facebook has lost 16% of its users over the last six months, the equivalent of over 200,000 users. But in another country, Facebook has gained almost 17 million users over the same period.

What countries are we talking about, you ask? Read on and we’ll tell you.