There’s no doubt that Google is kicking butt and taking names with its Android smartphones. A recent report by the market research firm NPD shows that Android phones outsold Apple’s iPhone for the first time in the first quarter of this year. That effectively makes Android the second-best selling mobile platform in the U.S. — right behind RIM’s Blackberry devices, which have been entrenched in the smartphone market for years.

Android’s increased popularity, and eventual domination of the U.S. smartphone market, is inevitable. As I’ve written previously, its success will be driven by its sheer ubiquity. Android phones are already available on all major cellular carriers in the U.S., and they all carry a variety of devices that range from entry-level to high-end.

But that same ubiquity is also Google’s greatest issue with Android right now. There are simply too many versions of the operating system out there and that’s become a major headache both for developers and users. What follows are a few suggestions on how Google could help fix its platform fragmentation problem before it becomes an even bigger issue.

If you’re using jQuery, a good thing you can do is to use the jQuery file hosted on one of the three public content delivery networks (CDNs) provided by Google, Microsoft and Edgecast (via MediaTemple).

This has several benefits:

• You offload your own servers.
• You increase the odds that the file is cached, since other sites will be linking to the same file.
• A CDN will probably deliver the file faster than you can.

So which of these free CDN options will give you the best performance?

Twitter processed 1.76 billion tweets in April. This is already significantly more than Twitter was handling in January (1.2 billion tweets). Counted in tweets, Twitter is growing like crazy.

So how many tweets will Twitter be handling by the end of the year? Based on Twitter’s growth rate until now, let’s try to predict what the rest of the year will look like (and make a pretty chart while we’re at it).

We stumbled upon an interesting statistic the other day: According to DomainTools there are more than 380 million deleted gTLD domain names, i.e. domain names that at some point have been registered but no longer exist. More than 80% of those are .com domain names.

This number needs to be put into perspective to understand how unnaturally large it is. The total number of active gTLD domain names (.com, .net, .org, etc.) today is about 118 million. We find it hard to believe that on top of these, there would have at some time existed another 380 million legitimate domain names.

So how did that number become so large? The answer is quite simple: domain tasting.

McAfee had a nasty surprise in store for their customers a couple of weeks ago. An automatic update to its antivirus software suddenly pointed out a system-critical file in Windows XP as malicious. The result was that the file was removed, and Windows XP stopped working.

This crippled entire companies, which often have large sets of computers running XP. To make matters worse: every single computer had to be manually restored. Considering many companies had thousands of Windows XP machines, you can imagine the time it took and the outrage it caused.

Accidents such as these are uncommon, but they still happen way too often for comfort. And if you think the latest incident with McAfee was a one-off? Think again.

If Facebook has its way (and it usually does), over the coming years a ton of websites and online services will become part of the open graph that Facebook is promoting, with Facebook firmly planted in the middle. The concept is very interesting, and the potential for this web of data from a wide variety of sources is enormous. You could say that Facebook will tie all our information, and the whole web, together.

There’s just one problem (two, if you count privacy): When the web becomes “interconnected” with Facebook, it also means that when Facebook breaks, the web breaks. In short, Facebook becomes a single point of failure for the web.

The iPad has made a huge splash in a very short time, and this in spite of only being available in the United States. Now that its release in other countries is getting closer every day, where is anticipation the hottest? Which countries are the most interested in the iPad?

This is one area where Google can come to the rescue of Apple (something we haven’t seen much of lately). Google Insights for Search can show the “regional interest” for various terms. When a brand name is involved, like the iPad, it becomes very useful since it will be same all over the world and will reflect interest in that brand or product. We used this tool to research the overall global interest in the iPad, and also where in the United States it’s most popular.

Instant messaging. We all use it, whether it be Skype, Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, or some other IM client or platform. We’ve come a long way since the days of ICQ, when IM as a phenomenon really took off. IM is now such an intricate part of our experience of the internet that we thought an infographic on the subject was in order. Enjoy!

When a big website goes down it doesn’t take long before Twitter is full of tweets lamenting that it’s down. This behavior is so common that even Twitter itself has “is down” as one of its query tips on the Twitter Search page.

Now that Google has added a Twitter timeline graph to its search engine, we can actually visualize how much people complain on Twitter when big sites go down. We can now see how the amount “down tweets” blow up. Finally we have some history to go with real-time search, so we should be grateful that Google got access to Twitter’s firehose.

How many users do the various web browsers really have? We often hear about market share percentages, but we rarely get to see any actual user numbers.

So let’s try to estimate how many people are using Internet Explorer, Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari and Opera. Not in market share percentages, but the actual number of people.

Do you want to know more about how big websites like Twitter, Facebook, Hotmail and others handle the technical challenges of dealing with massive amounts of visitors?

Well, you’re in luck, because many of those sites and services have engineering and/or developer blogs that share plenty of information about the challenges they have to deal with and the tools they use. This is an insider’s view that you usually can’t get anywhere else, giving us a unique view of what’s going on behind the scenes of some of the world’s largest web services.

Three tech companies seem to come up over and over again. They’ve become the trinity of tech, at least as far as most IT consumers are concerned. They are Microsoft, its long-time rival Apple, and Google.

Both Apple and Microsoft are veterans, having started their operations in the 1970s and gone public in the 1980s. In IT, that’s a very long time ago. Just think about it, these two companies were part of the birth of personal computing!

We thought it would be interesting to see how their fortunes (as in “business success”) have changed through the years, and how Google, a much later arrival, compares.

We all know the by now woeful tale of Internet Explorer 6, which close to a decade after its arrival still has a significant share of the web browser market. Its users have been extremely slow to abandon it in spite of there being two newer and much improved versions of Internet Explorer freely available. And this is with Microsoft actively encouraging an upgrade. You could even argue the same for Internet Explorer 7; why haven’t the vast majority of Internet Explorer users switched to version 8 by now?

This conundrum made us wonder how the other web browsers fare when it comes to getting their users to upgrade to newer versions. How quickly do Firefox, Safari, or Google Chrome users upgrade their browsers when new versions arrive?

With Ubuntu 10.4, codenamed Lucid Lynx, Ubuntu will change its look completely. Everything will be brand new; the logo, the user interface, and the color scheme (no more brown). It’s set to be released on April 29, less than a month away.

We are very curious to see if this makeover will give Ubuntu a boost in popularity. It’s already the most popular desktop Linux distribution, but will this new look, this new branding, make it easier for Ubuntu to cast its net even wider and grow the Linux user base as a whole?

Most blogs encourage sharing of their content on services like Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Reddit, and so on, usually via prominent buttons in connection with each post.

It’s a win-win situation for the bloggers and their readers. The bloggers make it easy for their readers to share content they like, and by sharing, readers drive more traffic to the blogs.

A ton of social sharing options are out there, but which ones are bloggers relying on the most?

Five years ago, no one had heard about jQuery. It was just an idea in the back of Javascript guru John Resig’s head. Today, jQuery is by far the most popular Javascript library in the world and is used by over 28% of all websites on the internet.

jQuery is open source, web developers love it, it’s been embraced by a slew of big companies, and is close to becoming a de facto standard for website development. It doesn’t just have the support of the open source developer community behind it, it’s even received official support from Microsoft.

We wanted to share an interesting observation regarding the two social networks that are dominating our collective mindshare these days: Facebook and Twitter.

Both get their fair share of attention from the media, but a very interesting pattern has emerged over the last year that we will reveal here below.

The hardware in the sky that makes the Global Positioning System work is a mystery to most of us. You, however, will soon know a lot more about it.

After all, why wouldn’t you want to know more about the system that makes all of today’s cool location-based services possible? GPS has become our everyman, everyday companion now that it’s present in just about every smartphone out there.

So here you go, more interesting GPS factoids than you can shake a stick at.

There was a significant amount of media attention earlier this week around a report from traffic monitoring company Hitwise that claimed Facebook now has more traffic than Google in the US.

So let’s have a look at how it’s doing in the rest of the world.

Have you ever wondered how much money Google, Microsoft, Apple, IBM, Yahoo, Amazon and other tech giants have in the bank? What kind of assets do they have, how much spending money do they have? The vague answer is, “a lot.” But if you want to find out exactly how much, read on.