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.

“Photograph what is close to you. Share it with the world!“ That’s one of the headlines on Aday.org, a global project that will attempt to document what goes around the world in one day.

This all takes place on Tuesday May 15, 2012, and Pingdom will be participating.

Today, Pingdom is proud to announce that we’ve added another great talent to our already amazing lineup of developers. Erik Trangärd will use his skills and experience with JavaScript, Rest, PHP and more, as a frontend developer, to enable Pingdom to bring you even more cool features and functionality.

We’re looking for guest bloggers for this blog, and you could be one of them.

If you follow the Royal Pingdom blog, you know we love cool and geeky stuff, like what’s happening with the Internet, web, performance, gadgets, and more.

Do you think you could contribute one or more articles to the Royal Pingdom blog?

In our continuing series of interviews about web performance, we’re now joined by Yannick Kunegel, Manager, Systems Engineering – Eastern Europe, Middle East, and Africa at Citrix Systems.

Citrix may not be the company that comes first to your mind when thinking about web performance or web companies. But if you look at its wide range of products and services, you’ll see that they do care very deeply about the web and how fast web services are for users.

Microsoft is not the company that comes to mind when you think about great design. Apple, perhaps, but not Microsoft.

But that may be changing, which we discovered when we looked back over 30 years of hardware designs from Microsoft. Although it took Redmond quite a while to get up to speed, its designs are starting to look pretty cool.

In just over two years, the share of web traffic in Asia that comes from mobile devices has almost tripled. In fact, in some countries, close to half of all web traffic comes from mobile devices. India is very close to mobile traffic breaking 50% of all web traffic, as are several other countries in Asia as well as Africa.

As we reported last Friday, the number of DNS root servers on the Internet has grown significantly the past few years. Now we will take a closer look at how those root servers are distributed across the world.

Since the root servers are critical to Internet’s DNS infrastructure, they would ideally be spread out in a way that serves the Internet population in a fair and even manner. That is, however, not the case.

Technorati’s Top 100 blogs is a great list, which we often use for various articles. It’s also a great place for you to find new blogs and other sites to follow, for all kinds of topics.

Now we have a new public service to announce – we’re monitoring the uptime of all the sites in the Technorati Top 100.

Today, May 5, it is 20 years since the first version of “the grandfather of 3D shooters” – Wolfenstein 3D – was released. In the two decades since 1992, can you imagine how many hours gamers around the world have spent with that game, not to mention its successors like the Doom and Quake series of games?

But what may not be as well remembered is that Wolfenstein 3D helped pioneer shareware as a distribution model for games and other software. This turned out to be incredibly important in a period when users were moving from BBSs (Bulletin Board Systems) to the Internet as a place to get their software.

As we noted a couple of weeks ago, the number of Internet users has doubled in the past five years. To handle this enormous influx of users, Internet’s infrastructure needs to grow as well. The Domain Name System (DNS), a critical part of that infrastructure, has more than met the challenge.

Five years ago there were 123 DNS root server sites (the “backend” of DNS) spread out on the Internet. Today there are more than twice as many, over 300. Five years ago, 46 countries had root servers. Today, 76 have them.

After our last interview with a representative of the Apache HTTP Server Project, we didn’t expect to hear so soon again from the leader in web server software.

But we now have the great privilege to present an interview about web performance with Sander Temme, member of the Project Management Committee member and contributor to the Apache HTTP Server project.

This is a part of our continuing series of interviews about web performance.

In January, we reported that South Korea has the fastest average Internet connection speed in the world, a position it’s commanded for many years.

Now, in the latest figures for Q4 2011, South Korea has increased its average Internet speed to 17.5 Mbps with close to 48 Mbps recorded as a peak speed.

Unfortunately, the news for most of the rest of the world is not as good.

The United States is the “founding father” of the Internet, so it’s somewhat ironic that none of the 50 best-connected cities in the world today is American.

Instead, the list of the top 50 cities in terms of connection speed is dominated by South Korea and Japan. Cities from only two other countries make an appearance: China (with Hong Kong), and Sweden (with Umeå and Göteborg). Amazingly, only four countries have cities on this list.

We’re going to show you a chart that confirms what some of you already suspected, and Microsoft probably isn’t too happy about. A lot of people only use Internet Explorer because they have to at the office, but at home they use a different web browser.

On workdays around 35.1% of all web browsing is done with IE. On weekends that number consistently drops to around 32.8%.

So if IE usage dips every weekend, which browsers do people use instead? For the most part, Google’s Chrome. On weekends, IE and Chrome usage is pretty much neck and neck these days. You could say that for home use, they are now on equal terms.

There’s no doubt that when the first iPhone was launched in 2007, it revolutionized not only the mobile phone industry, but the tech industry at large.

But what we have discovered is that, at least in terms of the guiding principles behind the iPhone’s raison d’être, Apple has been thinking about this for a long time.

What we’re about to reveal originates in a document dated 1979, in which Jef Raskin, then Manager of Publications at Apple, laid out many guiding principles behind the Macintosh computer’s design.

It’s almost spooky how applicable it is to the modern Apple and its thinking especially behind the iPhone.

We’ve noted many successful open source projects and products before on this blog, and the Web is arguably the biggest one of them all.

Two such products we’ve failed to recognize, however, are the very first web browser and server, simply called World Wide Web, developed by Tim Berners-Lee.

Today is especially important in the history of the web since on April 30, 1993, CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, released World Wide Web into the public domain.

Knäppa is a recyclable camera just introduced by IKEA. It is complete with zoom (move your arms in and out) and image stabilization (rest your arms on something).

Clearly, Knäppa is super simple, made out of one sheet of cardboard that folds up, one button, two plastic screws, two batteries, and a USB port. The company wants customers to use the camera to take pictures of their homes to share with others through the IKEA website.

But what may be the most amazing thing about the Knäppa camera is that its manual comes in 29 languages.

George Orwell’s arguably most famous novel, the dystopian Nineteen Eighty-Four, coined a number of phrases that are in widespread use today. One of them was “Big Brother,” an authority figure who watches every move you make, everywhere. The term has become synonymous with mass surveillance. As you can imagine, the book is easily as relevant today as it was back in 1949 when it was first published. (It’s a great read, btw.)

The usual complaints about modern-era Big Brothers – aside from that annoying reality show – tend to be targeted at initiatives to place more surveillance cameras in various locations (e.g. the camera-riddled London). Then of course there is the monitoring of our activities on the Internet by governments, ISPs and organizations with their own agendas.

In this continuing series of interviews about web performance we now turn to cloud application platform provider Heroku.

James Ward, Principal Developer Evangelist at Heroku, will take us through the current state of web performance, detailing what Heroku is working on, and give some advice as well.