Instagram is one of those crazy success stories, an app and social network that has grown tremendously fast. If you’ve noticed an increase in Instagram pictures being shared to other social networks lately, you’re not imagining things. Sharing from Instagram to Twitter is now double what it was two months ago, and 20x what it was a year ago.

Sharing from Instagram is not just increasing because more people are downloading the app, the average user is also sharing more. This according to data from Distimo (in collaboration with Skylines for photo sharing data), who just released their latest app store market report. The report also included this very revealing chart.

Google’s Dropbox competitor is finally here. At 09:30 PST, we detected that the drive.google.com website went live.

The interwebs have been buzzing with talk about this for a long time. Some of the earliest mentions of this service go back to 2006, so Google Drive has been many years in the making.

The recent intensity of the buzzing made us set up monitoring to see if we could catch Google in the act, so to speak. And now we have.

IRC (Internet Relay Chat) has been around since 1988, which makes it ancient in Internet terms. And although it’s still used by hundreds of thousands of users around the world, IRC has seen a dramatic downturn in usage.

We have talked to the creator of IRC, and others, about why the once so widely used technology has seemingly fallen out of favor with so many users.

Gulltaggen, “The Nordic Premier Digital Marketing Conference,” kicks off today in Norway. It’s an annual awards ceremony, which aims to “stimulate and reward the heroes in digital creativity.”

This year’s Gulltaggen is headlined by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, so it’s clearly quite a show. Of course this caught our attention so we set out to take a look the websites run by the producers of the projects that are up for an award at this year’s Gulltaggen.

We found some interesting things indeed.

In this report we will examine the current status of what is often referred to as the “Browser Wars.” How popular are the various web browsers around the world right now? As you’ll see, there are significant regional differences in web browser usage.

We’ve done this on two levels. First, a quick overview, and below that we’ve gone into more detail about the current web browser usage in each world region, as well as the overall usage in the world. Plenty of charts, we promise!

Since we’re always working on geeky and cool things here at Pingdom, we’d like to find one or a few freelancers we could collaborate with.

We already have some projects in mind, and new ones are popping up all the time, so we need a creative and reliable team that we can call on in times of need.

Perhaps you’ll be one of the chosen few?

We continue our series of interviews about web performance by talking to Arvind Jain, Engineering Director at Google.

His career started out at Microsoft, where he worked as a software engineer, then continued at Akamai and Riverbed, before he joined Google. At Google, Arvind is responsible for making Google products faster and he runs the “Make the web faster” initiative.

Pingdom would like to take this opportunity to introduce the latest addition to our geeky team. Anders Ekman has joined us as support technician.

Anders comes from Sala, a town not far from the Pingdom HQ in Västerås, Sweden. His older brother got him inspired and curious about computers at an early age, and he wanted to figure out what goes on inside the box, how it all works.

In high school Anders specialized in IT, which was the perfect choice for him, he says. But after school he wanted to see the world, and looked for IT-related jobs all over the place.

This year the number of Internet users worldwide reached 2.27 billion, almost exactly twice what it was in 5 years ago, 1.15 billion. We all know the Internet is big, but this kind of growth really puts things into perspective.

The Internet population has been swelling rapidly since the arrival of the World Wide Web (which rests firmly on top of the foundation provided by the Internet). It’s human nature to get used to changes, so most of us have a tendency to forget how rapidly the world has changed, and keeps changing.

Flash usage is declining, and to be perfectly honest, that isn’t a bad thing. At least not in the name of performance and responsiveness on our dear old World Wide Web.

We thought this chart was pretty telling, courtesy of HTTP Archive.

Did you look at your website on the new iPad yet? We have browsed quite a few sites already on that gorgeous 2048 by 1536 pixel display, and we can categorically state that the future has arrived.

But whether that future is all bright remains to be seen.

Early signs seem to indicate that we’ll have to endure more bloat, with the possibility that the average size of a web page balloons to almost 5 MB from the 1.1 MB average today.

Most of you probably noticed that Gmail experienced some downtime yesterday. If you missed it, you had probably retired to your Batcave.

Google was presenting up to 10% of Gmail users with a 500 error, leaving scores of people hanging, in some cases unable to work on necessary tasks.

There were some really funny tweets about the outage. And of course we at Pingdom love humor and this has to be one of the most hilarious ones.

Lately, the web has been abuzz with Instagram’s billion-dollar sale to Facebook. This is an enormous amount of money for a service that is less than two years old. Instagold, so to speak.

This made us think. As you know, there have been a fair amount of high-profile deals like this ever since the initial dot-com boom back around 1998-1999. When it comes to time invested versus the sales price, how well does the Instagram acquisition stack up? It should be pretty high up there, but let’s compare it with a number of other tech acquisitions to get some facts on the table.

Tomorrow Wednesday, April 18, the Velocity Online conference takes place 9-11:30 am PST (4 am Sydney, 4pm London, and 8pm Dubai).

If you have an interest in web performance in general, if you build or maintain sites and web infrastructure, this is the event for you.

It’s online and registration is free.

And just in time for Velocity Online we’ve got our very own Pingdom IRC network set up. You can join us there during the event to chat about the presentations, give your input on what the experts say, or just hang out and talk about web performance.

In the report “Linux kernel development,” the Linux Foundation details the development of the Linux kernel by presenting fascinating statistics.

The report contains lots of amazing numbers, which together offer an insight into the tremendous amount of work that goes on behind the scenes to develop the kernel, the core of the Linux OS.

We jumped head first into the report and extracted as much information as we could. Read on to get a real up-close look at the Linux kernel.

Yeah, we know, Apple is the hot thing right now and WWDC is the party you want to go to. But tickets to WWDC sold out in 8 days in 2010 and in less than 12 hours in 2011. Obviously, it’s critical that you get online just as soon as Apple has released the tickets.

That’s where Pingdom monitoring comes in, and here’s how you do it.

This is the first in a series of interviews about web performance. We kick off the series by talking with Jeremy Keith, the Technical Director at Clearleft, a UX agency in Brighton, United Kingdom. Jeremy has authored a number of books on topics including HTML5, Ajax, and DOM scripting.

Let’s find out what Jeremy thinks of the current state of web performance.

Would you be surprised if we tell you he has a lot to say on this topic?

WordPress is no doubt a very popular web publishing platform for blogs and other types of websites. But just how popular is it?

We just completed a study and found that WordPress is in use by 49% of the top 100 blogs in the world. This is an increase from the 32% we recorded three years ago.

Other developments since then include that custom blog publishing platforms are more common now, TypePad has all but disappeared from the top 100, Tumblr has made an entrance, and some companies really don’t want to spill the beans about what solutions they use.

Every time Apple releases a new product, we get to see how skilled they are as marketers. For every new iPhone that Apple has launched, the company has told a new story to sell it to us, something it has pushed a little bit extra when advertising the new product, especially in TV commercials.

For example, the iPhone 4S marketing wasn’t so much about the improved camera, or iCloud. Instead Siri stole the show, the wonder of having your own little virtual assistant right there in your pocket…

Making sure that as many people as possible are running the most recent version of their web browser of choice is a Good Thing ™ for so many reasons. Security is one. Performance is another. Compliance to web standards is another (a biggie).

We here at Pingdom want to make sure that as many people as possible run the latest web browser. This means happier web designers and developers, which in turn benefits end users. Full circle.

With that in mind, we want to make sure that we reward you if you run the latest version of your browser. Think of it as our little contribution to the promotion of web standards.