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.

We hear mostly about the social networking sites where English is the predominant language, like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. But what about those sites where the vast majority of users don’t speak or use English? We don’t hear about those very much.
But that doesn’t mean they’re not out there. And many are doing extremely well. One of them is even big enough to rival Facebook in sheer user count.
The social networking sites we list below have reached an overwhelming popularity outside of the (native) English-speaking population, often being local hits in one or just a few countries and a specific language.

If you suddenly find yourself without an Internet connection, there’s a good chance that somewhere a team of construction workers just uttered a collective “uh-oh” because their backhoe dug up a telecom cable. Oops.
It turns out that this problem is so common that it is costing millions upon millions of dollars in repairs every year. Backhoes, drilling and digging are serious cable killers.

Here’s a little-known fact: Even when your hosting provider says it has provided 100% uptime, that doesn’t necessarily mean that your site hasn’t had any downtime.
Why is that? Because many hosting providers calculate their uptime in ways that aren’t intuitive from a customer perspective, ways that sometimes exclude certain downtime.

Pingdom’s Twitter account has reached a nice little milestone: we now have more than 1,000 followers. 🙂
Sure, we don’t hold a candle to Ashton Kutcher and his 3.5 million followers, but it’s nice to see that more and more people are following the Pingdom team on Twitter. We really appreciate it.

We humans are (mostly) a social breed. Ever since we have been able to connect computers together, we have enjoyed using our computers to communicate with each other. These days it’s hard to imagine a life without computer messaging such as email, IM and other applications that let us communicate cheaply and over great distances.
We decided to take a look at the history of computer messaging, the technologies and services that ultimately led us to where we are today.

Lately there has been a lot of talk about RSS being dead, doomed, dying, a thing of the past, etc, etc, etc. (The latest wave seems to have been triggered by this article by Sam Diaz over at ZDNet.)
The arguments we’ve seen range from “these days I only use Twitter” to “I don’t use Google Reader anymore”. That last one seems to be a major gripe.
Come on, people.
RSS is a data syndication mechanism. RSS reader applications (such as the Google Reader) may or may not be losing some popularity, but that is an application issue and to go from there to saying that RSS itself is dead is just nonsense. That’s similar to saying that HTML is dead.

It seems like every month there is some kind of news story about leaked emails. When emails never intended for the public eye are leaked, the consequences can be huge. People have lost their jobs, whole companies have been embarrassed, and in some cases the information revealed can even be dangerous.
Considering how easily emails can be leaked, it’s almost surprising we don’t hear about leaks more often. Here are a few famous examples of leaked emails and what their consequences were.

Most single serving websites are very gimmicky, like telling you you’re awesome, showing you how to spell “definitely”, or playing a fail sound. Some, however, are actually useful.
If you’re unfamiliar with the term, a single serving site is a one-page website with its own domain name that focuses on doing just ONE thing. These sites are by their very nature limited in scope, and that’s the whole point. They need to be dead simple to use, and most of the time they are just designed to answer a very specific question or perform a simple task.
Here are some of the more useful single serving websites we here at Pingdom have stumbled upon in our wanderings around the Web.

The Facebook engineering blog often presents interesting findings about the nuts and bolts of Facebook and the technical side of running that enormous service. The latest post is about Facebook’s experimentation on how site speed affects the behavior of its users, called “Every Millisecond Counts”.
One thing that struck us as extremely interesting was the following findings about site speed.

Music and video streaming services in themselves are nothing new (as YouTube and others can attest to), but what is new is that finally some companies seem to be getting the big content providers on board. Spotify is gathering buzz with its music streaming service, and Voddler is about to launch a similar service for movies and TV series. And guess what? Both can be used for free.

Software piracy has been around basically since the inception of software, and copy protection methods almost as long, so today’s discussions around DRM really isn’t anything new. All the way back in 1976, a certain Bill Gates wrote an open letter to a computer hobbyist club complaining that “most of you steal your software.” Back in those days, however, even he considered copy protection to just be in the way and wasn’t an advocate for it.
There has been a huge number of more or less creative methods to prevent people from making illegal copies of games and other software, but the ones we think are the most interesting (and amusing to look back at) are the ones involving actual physical extras, frequently used in the 80’s and early 90’s. Here are a few gems from that era.

We all enjoy taking a late morning and some extra sleep now and then, but usually we want to do it on purpose. A large number of Swedish iPhone owners who use their iPhone as an alarm clock got an unexpectedly late start this morning when it turned out that their iPhone’s clock was running two hours behind.
The culprit apparently was the time synchronization server of their Swedish phone operator, which the iPhone synchronizes its clock against.

How many servers does Google have? Nobody outside Google knows exactly how many servers the company has, but there have been a number of estimates through the years. One of the most quoted ones is from 2006, when it was estimated that Google had approximately 450,000 servers. And that was three years ago.
Another estimate showed up in 2007, this time from the analyst firm Gartner, estimating the number of Google servers to one million.
Considering that both these estimates are from a long time ago and Google has grown its data centers significantly since then, it’s not unreasonable to assume that Google today has at least one million servers worldwide.

Ubuntu is just one of a myriad of Linux distributions, but no one can deny that its rise to fame has been meteoric, especially as a desktop OS.
This week Google announced a “forecast” feature in Google Insights for Search. Essentially it’s a new function that looks at the search history (popularity) of a term and tries to predict what the future trend for that term will look like.
So just out of curiosity we decided to try Ubuntu versus Linux to see what would happen.

They are unlikely to be compared in the first place, but when you start to think about it there are a LOT of things that Apple and Nintendo have in common.

With the rise of microblogging, URL shortening services have become extremely popular. And no wonder; just imagine sharing links on Twitter without one. Although some of these services have considerably more market share than others (we’re looking at you, Bit.ly and TinyURL), there are plenty of options out there.
One thing that has surprised us a bit here at Pingdom is that we haven’t seen any real numbers on how reliable and how fast these different URL shorteners are compared to each other. After all, adding a layer on top of the target URL (the direct link) means slower access and also adds a single point of failure, so these things should matter. So, we decided to test them.

Few have managed to make better use of the Open Source model than Mozilla, and we recently saw some very impressive numbers on how much of Mozilla’s work is done by volunteers versus its internal staff that we thought were worth sharing with you (emphasis in the quote below added by us).

Even as Mozilla’s internal staff has grown to 250, from 15 in 2005, an army of volunteers still contributes about 40% of the company’s work, which ranges from tweaks to the programming code to designing the Firefox logo.

Since we are a naturally curious bunch here at Pingdom, we had to ask ourselves how much the time that these volunteers contribute is actually worth in terms of money.

This is what Microsoft’s homepage looked back in 1994 when it was first launched, and its evolution during the following years.
Keep reading for a closer look at the seven first versions of Microsoft.com and some very retro web design.