SolarWinds Observability SaaS now offers synthetic transaction monitoring

One short blog post can have a major impact on how a business can be seen. One little tweet can convince thousands of customers to buy a product or to walk away from a company forever. Whether or not an employee’s online activities are sanctioned by his employer, even a little involvement with social media can have some extreme results.
This article takes a look at social media policies in action and gives some tips to companies on what they can do.

With the Internet growing rapidly over the years, the number of generic top-level domains (gTLDs) has increased from just a handful to about twenty, with many more proposed or in planning. Some, such as .com and .edu, have seen widespread adoption and are a useful contribution to the Internet. Others haven’t been quite as lucky. You could say they have flopped.
From domain extensions that never made it past the planning table, to those that make little sense at all, there are probably more flops than successes. Here are five of the worst TLD flops in Internet history (in no specific order).

In a year in which tech companies have struggled to stay alive, Apple’s stock has doubled.
In January of 2009, Apple stock was priced at $78. Last week, it closed at $184. Also late last week, three major investment firms elevated their expectations for Apple. On Thursday, Oppenheimer analyst Yair Reiner increased his target price for Apple from $185 to $210, while Bank of America/Merrill Lynch analyst Scott Craig increased his target from $185 to $220. On Friday, UBS analyst Maynard Um jumped on the Apple bandwagon, and raised the bet, escalating Apple’s target price from $170 to $265.
A 236% jump in stock price from January to October would be remarkable for any company. But in the case of Apple, it happened under the most bizarre of circumstances.

The combination of high bandwidth and low-cost hard drives has created a small revolution in online storage. Web-based storage like DropBox, Mozy, Data Deposit Box, and Amazon S3 offer individual computer users and firms of various sizes a fast, convenient, and flexible way to store their data.
But before you or your company jump in credit card first, you should consider the following five factors before you choose an online storage solution.

Facebook has released a “happiness index” based on the status updates people make on their site. They have an algorithm that looks for words connected with positive and negative feelings, and categorize the status updates accordingly.
The GNH as it’s called, the Gross National Happiness index, currently only looks at status updates from US Facebook users, which makes sense since it’s a language-based study tool. (Hopefully Facebook will soon add similar indices for other countries as well.)
When you study the graphs that Facebook generates, a weekly pattern quickly becomes obvious.

It’s an exciting time for those looking forward to the rise of tablet computing devices: Not only are the rumors running rampant about Apple’s potential tablet, we’re also finally seeing what Microsoft is bringing to the table with their Courier project.
Even if the final products that hit stores aren’t exactly what we see today, it’s worth considering what these early stabs could represent for the future of tablet computing.

When most people think of Open Source, they think of the big, highly-publicized projects like Linux, Firefox, and OpenOffice.org. But for every high-profile open source project, there are dozens of lesser-known projects. Just pay a visit to SourceForge if you don’t believe me.
Simply because certain projects don’t grab the attention that the big names do doesn’t mean that they don’t merit a closer look. In fact, a number deserve far more notice than they get.
Let’s take a look at three open source projects that any webmaster or web developer should keep an eye on. They just might change the way you work.

Last week, Gmail failed – for the third time in recent months. Yet again, the media and blogosphere declared the end of hosted services, software-as-a-service and cloud computing as we know it.
Here’s why I disagree:
(Read on to get cloud computing expert Guy Rosen’s take on how the latest Gmail problems relate to the viability of cloud computing in general.)

Summer is over. The temperature is dropping and winter is looming on the horizon, which means that it’ll soon be time to take out those scarfs and snow caps and whatever other attire you use to protect yourself against the cold.
Many see this as an opportunity for self-expression, and the geeks of the world are no exception. Here’s how you can stay warm in awesome geek style throughout the winter.

Facebook claims to have Twitter “in the rear-view mirror,” but of course the company is keeping a close eye on what’s happening with Twitter. The recent inclusion of Twitter-style tagging with the @-symbol in Facebook certainly seems more than a little inspired by Twitter.
There is one thing we find a wee bit strange, though. Although we love Twitter and the service is clearly growing like crazy, the way people are talking about Twitter and Facebook often makes it sound like Twitter may overtake Facebook any day now. Those people need to realize how big Facebook really is.

Verisign, the registry that handles the .com and .net top-level domains (TLDs), has released a new edition of its quarterly Domain Name Industry Brief, a report covering trends within the domain name industry.
As usual the report is crammed full of data about domain name registration trends and which TLDs are the most popular. We’ve cherry-picked some of the more interesting data points for your reading pleasure.

Since the dawn of technology people have been arguing about which technology is better. As with all such debates there are usually no simple answers and it often comes down to personal taste.
These discussions tend to be very infected due to the almost religious belief shown by the most hardcore supporters of a technology, a thorough conviction that all other options are inferior. Sometimes the technology creators themselves also add fuel to the fire by joining the discussions.

Are young Internet users less stingy than old ones? That certainly seems to be the case when it comes to paying for online content according to a new survey by paidContent:UK.
In the survey, 1,188 UK adults between the ages 16-64 were asked what they would do if their favorite news site started charging money. The results weren’t exactly what you might expect.

The world isn’t a fair place, and yet another way this is laid bare is the huge differences shown in Internet penetration among the population of the various world regions. We thought it would be interesting to see what kind of an effect this is having on the world Internet population of today.
Read on for a set of very revealing statistics and charts . . .

People are getting used to broadband connections, more powerful web browsers, and a speedier web experience in general. A new study shows how the expectations of Internet users have changed significantly over the last couple of years. We expect websites to be a lot faster.

The Facebook phenomenon continues. Yesterday Facebook announced that it has a whopping 300 million active users.
Three. Hundred. Million. Users.
For some perspective on how huge that is . . .

Twitter’s meteoric rise to fame has been hard to miss, especially after it really took off in 2009. The latest number being thrown around is that the service will soon have 18 million users in the United States alone.
We all know that Twitter is extremely popular in the United States, but it’s pretty darn popular in the rest of the world as well (Pingdom is on Twitter, and we’re Swedes!) But it took Twitter a while to get there.
Let’s take a tour of the geographic expansion of Twitter from its launch in 2006 until today in 2009.

Comscore has released some interesting statistics about the US traffic to the business-oriented social networking site LinkedIn. According to Comscore, LinkedIn had 8 million US visitors in July this year, an increase of 66% compared to a year ago.
But the really interesting part was some data extraction about the kind of visitors that LinkedIn is getting. By cross-referencing visits to job-seeking sites with visits to LinkedIn, Comscore was able to estimate of how many of LinkedIn’s visitors are job seekers (and even to what degree those visitors are looking for a job).

Last Friday we started our look into the history of computer messaging and which applications and services we have used to communicate over computer networks through the decades.
So far we have covered the time period from 1960 to 1990, i.e. the era before the birth of the World Wide Web that we live in today. Now it’s time to continue our journey through the history of computer messaging, from 1990 until today.

We have entered a new era when it’s easier than ever before to get your opinion out there. Writing a short message on Twitter takes almost no effort at all and it is immediately published on the Web. Services like Twitter have amplified the word-of-mouth effect several times over.
For an extreme example, just check out the talk on Twitter when Gmail is down.
There is a parallel here to blogging. What regular blogging once did for word of mouth was to make it possible for anyone to become a publisher (going from “one-to-one” to “one-to-many” communication). This has now been taken one step further since even those reluctant to maintain a blog won’t think twice about sending out a quick message on Twitter or any other micro-blogging service.