Back in 1996 the Web was starting to gain some serious momentum, but it was still just a few years old. Now in 2008, looking 12 years back into the past of the Web can be a both nostalgic and entertaining experience.

We have used the good old WayBack Machine (a.k.a the Internet Archive) to track down screenshots of what websites looked like back in 1996-97.

We stumbled upon this very weird picture on the front page of the Swedish IDG News website next to an article about how businesses can promote themselves on Twitter. The strange thing is that the image they used is the Twitter logo on what looks like a cigarette pack.

What were they thinking? Twitter smokes?

We have taken a screenshot so you can see what we’re talking about.

A benefit of open source software is the ability to take the code base of an application and develop it in a new direction. This is, as most of you probably know, called forking, and is very common in the open source community. For example, many Linux distributions can be traced back to either Debian, Fedora or Slackware.

Much of the open source software that is in popular use today was born from other projects. We thought it would be interesting to take a look at the history of some of these software forks and find out WHY they happened in the first place.

Google Chrome has its “incognito” mode, IE 8 has its “InPrivate browsing” mode and Safari has its “private browsing” mode. It’s only a matter of time until Firefox adds one as well. These new privacy modes in the various web browsers will create serious problems for site owners that rely on revenue from affiliate programs and targeted advertising. It will also change the landscape for web statistics software and skew visitor statistics for websites.

Why? Statistics software (for example Google’s own Analytics), affiliate tracking, and targeted ads all rely on cookies to work. People have been able to disable cookies for a long time, but this is the first time that people will be able to enter a browser mode that prevents cookies from being stored with just a simple click.

In this article we focus on the site owners’ perspective and will cover three main areas where the browser privacy modes will hurt them.

We’re a few days early, but Google is about to turn 10 years old this month (they opened their doors in September 1998).

On the Web, a decade is a looong time, so we were curious to see what the Google website looked like when it originally launched.

At the time, Google didn’t have much on the actual Google.com domain: Only two links, one to the regular Google version, then hosted at google.stanford.edu and called “Google Search Engine Prototype,” and another to a beta version named “Might-work-some-of-the-time prototype.”

Every day brings a new set of outages on the Internet. Websites go down, online services run into trouble, networks have glitches, and so on. When a lot of users are affected, these outages make the news and set the blogosphere abuzz. We here at Pingdom work with downtime-related issues every day and probably spend more time reading about these things than most, so we decided to sum up the year so far for your convenience, and add some analysis of our own in the process.

These are 14 (not 13, that would be bad luck! 😉 ) of the more notable Web- and Internet-related outages and incidents so far in 2008. We chose outages that have either affected a lot of people, or have other implications that we deemed important to highlight.

One thing that the following examples clearly show is that no one is immune to downtime. Not Google, not Microsoft, and not Apple. In addition to this, sometimes whole parts of the Internet itself simply break.

Twitter seems to be making good on their promise to improve the stability of their microblogging service, at least when it comes to the website itself (which is what we monitor here at Pingdom). Lately, their website has shown a significant improvement in both availability and response time. Is the infamous Twitter “fail whale” facing an early retirement?

We have the numbers.

Digg has become synonymous with “social news”, but there are a number of other sites with similar concepts out there, many of them with their sights set on trying to remove Digg from the throne. We have looked at the traffic trends for 10 different social news sites to get an idea of how it is going for Digg and its competitors.

By the end of the nineties the Web had risen to become a huge factor in the world economy, and we were at the height of the dot-com bubble. Billion-dollar acquisitions of Web companies were not uncommon.

This article lists billion-dollar Web acquisitions that never delivered on their promise. Some companies and services dwindled away into obscurity, some were sold for significantly less money than they were bought for, and some just crashed and burned.

Many of these brands are still in use today, though they don’t have the luster they once had.

There are a lot of “Chief Something Officer” titles, such as CEO, CTO, CMO, and so on. But here is a new one: Mosso recently announced that they have hired a Chief Uptime Officer. A CUO! Considering that we here at Pingdom are all about uptime, we LOVE the title. It’s the first time we’ve […]

Yesterday, the highly popular tech blog Mashable had a post covering “13 Free and Cheap Website Monitoring Services”. The uptime monitoring service provided by Pingdom isn’t free, but it was still the first on the list. Here is what Mashable had to say about Pingdom: Pingdom has a good set of cheap packages, but alas, […]

We here at Pingdom are computer geeks, and proud of it. None of us have any geeky vanity plates (custom license plates) on our cars, though. But others have, and we love those. This post is a gallery of pictures of some of the coolest vanity plates we have ever seen, collected from around the […]

The Linux landscape is constantly changing and has a strong community of both developers and users. But where is Linux the most popular, and where are the different Linux distributions the most popular? To try to answer these questions, we have looked at data from Google with the highly useful Insights for Search, which gave […]

With Firefox 3, Mozilla has changed the way Firefox handles SSL certificates. This change could scare away visitors from tens of thousands of websites that have expired or self-signed SSL certificates. If you visit a website with either an expired or a self-signed SSL certificate, Firefox 3 will not show that page at all. Instead […]

Tricky, funny and interesting, these are some questions people claim to have been asked at job interviews with Microsoft and Google. And IKEA, sort of… We came across these because we are currently looking for a developer and a support technician to join the Pingdom team, and were searching around the Web for some inspiration […]

How much you pay for your Apple Mac products depends greatly on where you live. This we already know, but how big that difference actually is may come as a shock to many. We looked at the prices in the United States, Europe and Australia and found some pretty substantial differences. Why do this comparison? […]

With the help of Google data, we have looked at 12 of the top social networks to answer a simple, but highly interesting question: Where are they the most popular? The social networks we included in this survey were MySpace, Facebook, Hi5, Friendster, LinkedIn, Orkut, Last.fm, LiveJournal, Xanga, Bebo, Imeem and Twitter. Popularity by country […]

Steve Souders, the creator of YSlow and the author of the book High Performance Web Sites, is one of the most respected experts on website performance in the world. We here at Pingdom are big fans of his work, and decided to probe his mind about the excellent YSlow Firefox add-on for evaluating website performance […]

Finding out which web hosting companies really are the largest ones can be difficult. This article takes a number of different factors into consideration to not just find out which ones are the largest today, but also which of them are growing the fastest. Today’s leader may not be tomorrow’s. When we talk about the […]

(We would like issue a warning to sensitive viewers. This can be hard to watch. 😉 ) The iPhone finally launched here in Sweden this July and some of us at Pingdom have already bought one. We love our iPhones. So we can only image what it must feel like to have your shiny new […]