Facebook recently passed an incredible milestone, 500 million active users. And it keeps growing.

Although Facebook initially focused on the United States, it soon turned its eyes towards the horizon and the rest of the world. And it’s a tactic that’s been working extremely well. Facebook’s current user base is more than 1.6 times the size of the entire US population. If Facebook were a country, it’d be second only to China and India.

And speaking of countries… Now that it’s gone global, which countries have the most users on Facebook?

Linux has been around for almost two decades now. It has become a resounding success as a server OS (for example as the L in the famous LAMP stack), and more recently as a mobile OS (Android). But what about on the desktop?

Linux enthusiasts have been predicting the rise of Linux as a desktop OS for the better part of a decade. To name just one of many examples, in 2003, Siemens Business Systems predicted that Linux would have captured 20% of the desktop market by 2008.

Well, it’s now 2010, and desktop Linux isn’t even close to 20%. Or one tenth of that.

Downtime sucks. When your website is down, it might as well be invisible. That alone should be reason enough to monitor your website’s availability, but just to really push home this point, here are another 19 excellent reasons why you should monitor your website.

No wonder many bloggers have a hard time getting noticed. According to Blogpulse, there are more than 144 million blogs in the world, publishing 1 million posts per day. So there is some competition.

That’s an awful lot of hay for potential readers to sift through for that one single needle that your blog represents.

Thankfully, it’s not quite as bad as it looks.

Google has been dominating the search engine market for years, but at least there are some competitors that have a few percent each.

But if you look at mobile search, i.e. search on mobile devices, which is more or less the smartphone market, Google is utterly crushing the competition to a level that it’s never managed in the regular search market.

Just look at this very telling chart, showing Google’s overall search and mobile search market shares in relation to those of Yahoo and Bing, its two closest rivals. (These are global stats.)

The world is a big place, but so is the Internet. We know which countries are the largest in the real world, but what about on the Internet?

This article examines which countries are the largest in terms of Internet users, and will also look into their growth potential. That last point is very interesting to look at, because it’s an indication of how the power balance on the Internet might shift in the future.

But before we head on to the charts, let’s start with a few interesting findings.

Not to beat a dead horse, but why didn’t Apple think of this…? 🙂

In this post we show you the ultimate, high-tech solution to a dilemma that the Media have been discussing for weeks now; the iPhone antenna “death grip”.

Remember, you saw it here first.

DNS, the Domain Name System, is a vital part of the Internet. And since it’s such a vital part of the Internet, it’s important that websites have correct DNS settings. If they don’t, it can lead to a number of problems, one of them being downtime. On top of that, bad DNS settings can be hard to track down and can cause a lot of head ache for webmasters and site owners.

We here at Pingdom run a website monitoring service that tracks the uptime of tens of thousands of websites for our users, so we deal with site issues on a daily basis. Over time, it has become exceedingly clear that a large portion of the various errors we detect are caused by bad DNS settings or poorly configured DNS servers.

This is why we now are introducing an addition to our free webmaster tools: a DNS health test.

Google is a bit of a paradox. On one hand, it promotes openness, with a stated mission to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” An admirable goal. On the other hand Google is often secretive when it comes to publicly sharing information about its own websites and services.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in Google’s own public data tools. Try getting information about Google websites in any of these tools and you will notice that most of this information is nowhere to be found. You’ll be able to find information about any website on the Internet, but not Google’s own.

The .com top-level domain has dominated the Internet pretty much from the start, and that’s still the case. But how strong is this dominance? After all, there are now approximately 200 million registered domain names, and less than half of those are .coms.

To find out what the current situation looks like for actual, popular websites, we’ve looked at this from two different perspectives:

• The top 10,000 websites in the world.
• The top 10,000 websites in the United States.

This article will show you the distribution of top-level domains (TLDs) among these top websites to show you how widely used .com is today, and how the other top-level domains are doing by comparison.

Everyone knows that the really big and popular websites have a ton of visitors. But how many? How much does it take to reach the top?

We were curious about this ourselves. We’ve all seen the almost absurd numbers involved with the very top sites (like Facebook), but what about website number 50, or 100, or 500? What does it take for a website, in terms of visitors, to reach such a ranking?

Microsoft just announced that it has sold 150 million copies of Windows 7, and that the OS is selling at a pace of seven per second. Not bad for an OS that was launched just eight months ago.

At that pace, Windows 7 will rapidly be gaining market share. So how is it doing compared to its older siblings, Windows Vista and Windows XP?

Here’s a graph showing how the overall market shares for these three operating systems have changed over the last 12 months.

That Twitter has been expanding well outside the borders of the United States is well known. It’s becoming a global social media phenomenon and much of its growth is currently coming from this international expansion. We thought it would be interesting to investigate where Twitter is growing the fastest right now.

By looking at traffic data to Twitter.com, we’ve identified several countries where Twitter is currently growing rapidly (this year). These are not necessarily countries that have a ton of Twitter users yet, but rather places where the traffic curve is pointing sharply upwards.

Paypal has been around since 1998 (eBay bought it in 2002), which is a small eternity in internet time. By now it’s easily the most established online payment solution, so it should be in a great position to benefit from our general tendency to increasingly buy and pay for things online.

And something drastic happened about a year ago. Just look at how traffic to Paypal.com has been growing.

Looks like we’re headed for a big milestone on the Internet: 200 million registered domain names. By the end of Q1 this year there were a total of 193 million domain names when counting all top-level domains. That was two months ago.

When we say all top-level domains, we mean both gTLDs and ccTLDs. gTLDs are those generic top-level domains like .com, .net and .org. ccTLDs are country code top-level domains such as .de, .cn and .uk.

We may already have passed 200 million domain names, actually. Two months ago, there were less than 117 million gTLDs. Now there are almost 121 million. That’s an increase of more than 4 million domain names, and that without including the more than 240 ccTLDs that exist out there. So, if you count all top-level domains together, 200 million either is very, very close, or a number we’ve recently passed.

Back in December 2009, the number of tweets per month on Twitter reached 1 billion for the first time. Now in May, we reached yet another milestone: 2 billion tweets per month (or to be precise, 1.99 billion, which is close enough).

We actually called that this would happen at this exact point in time, based on a prediction we’d made for Twitter’s “tweet growth” in 2010 a while back.

A significant number of iPhone owners have chosen to circumvent Apple’s default iPhone OS installation with a hacked version that lets them install applications from outside the App Store, have applications running in the background, and so on. It’s called, as you probably know, “jailbreaking”.

There are a lot of jailbroken iPhones out there. Exactly how many is hard to tell, but there are estimates that as many as 8.5% of all iPhones and iPod Touches are jailbroken. That number comes from Jay Freeman, founder of Cydia, a kind of alternative app store for jailbroken iPhones.

So where in the world is it most common to jailbreak your iPhone?

Microsoft finally admitted to the existence of its fabled dual-screen Courier tablet. But unfortunately for us, that admission only came after Gizmodo reported the project was dead. Despite being one of the more intriguing and innovative products to bear the Microsoft name in recent memory, the company couldn’t, or wouldn’t, follow through with it.

It’s an old complaint, but I think it’s the perfect time to revisit Microsoft’s innovation issues. Along with the death of the Courier, it also recently announced details on its new Kin phones – which I find disappointing for multiple reasons.

It seems like not a week goes by without new numbers of how many apps there are in Apple’s iPhone App Store or Google’s Android Market. And frankly, it’s starting to get ridiculous.

First of all, there is the old adage of “quality, not quantity” to think about (remember that one?), and then there’s another aspect: what counts as an app?

Domain names, without them the web would just be a bunch of hard-to-remember IP addresses. Imagine telling your buddies, “Oh, I found this awesome site at 72.14.204.104 last night.”

And yet, many of us don’t know all that much about them. Prepare to be cured of that, because here is…