Big data has become one the new buzzwords on the Internet. It refers to the massive amounts of data that many modern web services deal with. This post will list some of the more useful software available to web developers for working with big data.

Few tech companies can tap into the zeitgeist like Apple does. Another excellent example of this has been the hype build-up leading up to the iPad 2 launch. People just couldn’t stop talking about it.

Of course, with the first iPad being such a popular product, interest in its successor has been growing rapidly over the past few months, and speculation has been running rampant.

You know how we love proper data, so here is a graph showing the interest in iPad 2 leading up to the March 2 announcement (based on Google search stats).

Site issues come in all shapes and forms, and no one seems immune. Google’s Gmail problems the last couple of days, where a number of Gmail users temporarily lost all of their emails, was proof that Murphy’s Law is alive and well on the Internet.

However, this post is not really about that specific incident, but rather about an interesting detail in the way Google communicated the problem.

The recent events in countries like Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and several other places have once more reminded us why the Internet is such a game changer. It facilitates the flow of information and mass communication to levels unprecedented in history. It is organic, and in most cases, independent of national interests. It circumvents the traditional, official channels of information.

Two weeks ago we released the beta of our new public report pages (also known as status pages), and we’ve been overwhelmed by the positive feedback we’ve received from our users.

Amazon recently published some numbers showing how Amazon S3 (Amazon’s “cloud-based” storage service) has grown over the years. They even included a chart, which you can see here below, which clearly shows how the number of objects stored in S3 has exploded.

In most countries today, Facebook is either the most popular, or second or third most popular website. The social network has reached such widespread popularity that it can these days only really be compared to Google, the only other company that can brag about a similar reach.

But Facebook isn’t in the top everywhere. There are still several countries where Facebook hasn’t been able to reach a dominant position (at least not yet).

Which countries? Read on to find out.

Valentine’s Day is a great day for any vendor selling flowers. Over the years, a large number of websites selling flowers have sprung up, and as you might expect, many of these websites are flooded by eager shoppers on February 14 wanting to buy flowers and gifts for their loved ones.

This is big business. Americans are expected to spend $18.6 billion on Valentine’s Day gifts this year.

Now here is the catch. Every year, some of these websites won’t be prepared to handle the increase in visitor traffic and as a result they slow down significantly, or even crash under the pressure.

We all know Google has awesome office spaces, they’re well known for it and we’ve all seen the colorful pics, but the truth is that quite a few tech and web companies have taken the extra step and made their office environments pretty amazing places to work.

Here are a few examples…

Pardon the wordplay on “dog-eat-dog world,” but as you’ll see it applies perfectly to what is going on with Windows in the desktop OS space.

Because there are several interesting things going on. Some quite expected, others not so much.

First of all, the situation now is that Windows 7 has made a real splash. It’s already passed Windows Vista and is getting closer and closer to that clunky old workhorse that refuses to die, Windows XP.

This is how the different versions of Windows were divided one year ago, versus now…

Starting today all Pingdom users can try out our new and improved public report pages, seen here below. These reports, also known as status pages, let you make some or all of your Pingdom monitoring results public, promoting transparency toward your users.

Since the public reports are hosted by Pingdom, they will be available even when your own website is down. They are very handy as automatically updated public status pages for web services and hosting companies, to name one example.

Think what you will about Facebook, but the main social network of choice today has become so big and so prevalent that there’s no escaping it. And we spend an almost ridiculous amount of time on Facebook. Another behemoth that is virtually everywhere and used by everyone is YouTube. You may have heard of it.

Let us walk you through some numbers for these two sites to give you an idea of how much they are being used worldwide and the massive amount of time we are spending on them.

Building websites and web applications today is not only about being a great programmer, it’s even more important to be a smart programmer. This means to re-use existing code and applications when possible instead of re-inventing the wheel.

Open source has been around for ages and much of the web is built using it. Every developer knows about Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP (LAMP).

But what about all the other open source projects out there? As a web developer you can save lots of time or optimize the performance of your applications by using many of the other projects that are available.

Lets take a look on what’s out there, free for everyone to use.

We’ve been working on a brand new API for Pingdom and would now like to work together with a selection of beta testers to make sure it’s the best it can be before we release it into the wild.

This new API is part of a wave of backend development we’re doing here at Pingdom that will be the basis for taking our uptime monitoring service to new heights. We’re growing fast and have recently added several really talented developers to our team, and another hiring spree is coming up in a week or two for seven new positions. You will see a lot happening with Pingdom over the coming year.

As you may have seen in our “Internet 2010 in numbers” recap, the amount of email spam on the Internet is mind-boggling. Approximately 89% of all emails are spam, resulting in an estimated 260 billion spam emails sent every single day.

We thought it might be interesting to dig a bit deeper into the facts and figures around spam, so we’ve gone through a massive 66-page report from Symantec about spam and malware in 2010 to get you a ton of interesting little nuggets of information.

The Internet has given even small companies the chance to reach a huge audience worldwide. This has resulted in a number of companies and organizations that provide services to a huge number of users in spite of having a relatively small number of employees.

The companies and organizations we’ve included here have at least an estimated 10 million users or more.

What happened with the Internet in 2010?

How many websites were added? How many emails were sent? How many Internet users were there? This post will answer all of those questions and many, many more. If it’s stats you want, you’ve come to the right place.

We used a wide variety of sources from around the Web to put this post together. You can find the full list of source references at the bottom of the post if you’re interested. We here at Pingdom also did some additional calculations to get you even more numbers to chew on.

Prepare for a good kind of information overload. 😉

The open source movement is a popular one, and it’s certainly made its mark on the software landscape. But where has it made its biggest mark? What is the most successful open source endeavor of all time?

Actually, when you see it as a whole, isn’t the Web the biggest open source success of them all?

Perhaps the most famous example is the LAMP stack that lies behind so many websites, i.e. Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. But there’s so much more when you think about it.

Here are some of the open source projects that make the Web tick.

Automattic, the company behind the popular open source blogging software Wordpress (found at Wordpress.org) and the Wordpress.com blogging service, recently revealed some very interesting new statistics. This little nugget of gold caught our attention (emphasis added by us):

There are over 32 million WordPress publishers as of December 2010: 16 million blogs hosted on WordPress.com plus 16.7 million active installations of the WordPress.org software.

That there are more than 32 million Wordpress blogs in total is impressive, but it is the world’s most popular blogging platform so the number should be high. The really amazing number here is that very close to half of those blogs are now hosted on the Wordpress.com service.

The World Wide Web would be nothing without web servers, and Apache has been king of that hill for a long time now. Although its market share has been slipping a bit in recent years, Apache came back with a vengeance in 2010.

This became abundantly clear as we examined the growth of the top five web servers during the past year, from December 2009 to December 2010. As you’ll see, Apache really had a great year.