For some time now we’ve been monitoring 34 major US sports and news sites related to sports. Our recent articles on the Super Bowl are a result of that monitoring.

Now you can look at how these sites are doing yourself on the public reports page for this list of US sports websites.

Want us to add a site?

This is really only the first step to get us started. So we’d like your input on what sites to include.

If you would like to see any major US sports website added to the list, please let us know. The comment section below is a good place, as is Twitter and Google+.

Photo by davidgsteadman.

This was a post from the guys at Pingdom, a site monitoring service that makes sure you're the first to know when your site is down. Check it out for free.

Who has not used Google Maps? Raise your hand! Since the launch 7 years ago, Google Maps has become the de facto map service that users around the world go to for all their mapping needs.

As we say Happy Birthday to Google Maps, read on to find out some of the critical milestones in its history, and some amazing numbers and statistics.

Important dates for Google Maps

We have collected quite a number of dates, statistics, and other information covering Google Maps’ 7-year history. First, let’s look at some dates in the timeline of Google Maps:

• 2004 – Google Inc. bought Australian company Where 2 Technologies, where two Danish brothers were working on a C++ programing project, the embryo to Google Maps.
• 8 – February 8, 2005, Google Maps was officially announced.
• 2005 – In June, Google released the Google Maps API.
• 2006 – On January 23, Google Maps was updated to use the same satellite image database as Google Earth.
• 30 – The number of cities in the US included in Google Traffic when it officially launched on February 28, 2007.
• 360 – The panoramic view offered by Google Street View, introduced on May 25, 2007.
• 2007 – On August 21, Google announced a simple way to embed Google Maps into other websites.
• 2008 – On July 15, walking directions were added.
• 2009 – Google Maps overtook MapQuest in terms of traffic in January.
• 2010 – On Christmas and New Years day, mobile usage of Google Maps surpassed desktop usage for the first time.
• 40% – This percentage of all Google Maps usage was from mobile devices as of March 2011.
• 200 million – Google Maps for Mobile had this many users as of May 2011.

Amazing Google Maps facts and figures

Next, let’s dig into some numbers and statistics relating to Google Maps:

• 2,337 – The number of mashups using Google’s API that are listed on ProgrammableWeb.
• 15% – This is the usage share of the Google Maps API, currently the most used API tracked by ProgrammableWeb..
• 25,000 – The maximum number of map loads any Google Maps API may generate per day for up to 90 consecutive days without incurring a cost.
• 800-1500 feet – The altitude from which most of the high-resolution imagery of cities you find in Google Maps are taken, even though Google uses the word satellite.
• 0 – If you try to look at North Korea using Google Maps you will only see the satellite image. It’s the only country in the world with no data available in Google Maps.
• 23 – The maximum zoom level in Google Maps, only available in a small number of places. In most areas the zoom level stops at 20.
• 12 billion – The number of miles per year that Google Maps Navigation, included on Android handsets, has guided users.
• 2 years – The time saved per day for users of Google Maps Navigation with the traffic routing functionality.
• 1.18% – The share of sites in the top 10,000 of sites tracked by BuiltWith.com that use Google Maps
• 1,162,460 – In total, BuiltWith.com reports that this many sites use Google Maps.
• Interest for Google Maps has steadily increased since its introduction, as measured by Google Trends.

Where does Google Maps go from here?

There seems to be no doubt that mobile is where the emphasis lies for Google Maps in the future. With location-based services like Latitude and Places, Maps is arguably critical to Google’s future. We look forward to what Google can come up with next.

Do you have any cool and exciting Google Maps mashups or projects that you’d like to share with us? Use the comments below or Twitter.

Source is Wikipedia, if not otherwise indicated with a link.

This was a post from the guys at Pingdom, a site monitoring service that makes sure you're the first to know when your site is down. Check it out for free.

In 2010, there were just over 1 million secure Internet websites worldwide. Almost half of those, or 446,992 to be exact, were located in the United States.

But in which country can we find the most secure websites in relation to population? The answer may surprise you.

The country with the highest number of secure websites per person is…

If we look at where in world we can find the highest number of secure Internet websites in relation to the size of the population, we get a very interesting picture. Gibraltar, with a population of around 30,000, tops the list, followed by Bermuda (approx. 65,000 population), and Liechtenstein (approx. 36,000 population). In absolute numbers, there were only 390 secure Internet websites in Gibraltar, in 2010.

Total number of secure servers

If we instead look at the total number of secure Internet websites per country in 2010, it produces a very different picture. Here’s the top 10 list:

• 446,992 – United States
• 86,878 – United Kingdom
• 82,823 – Japan
• 71,312 – Germany
• 55,739 – South Korea
• 42,258 – Canada
• 39,317 – Australia
• 37,828 – Netherlands
• 19,275 – France
• 14,614 – Switzerland

That’s a lot of secure Internet websites in many of the countries that would probably top the list for most people if they were asked about where such websites could be found.

What about back in 2001?

Just as an interesting comparison, we went back to 2001 to see how it compares to 2010. Gibraltar may be at the top in 2010, but nine years earlier, in 2001, the country was not on the chart. Instead, Liechtenstein was number one, but only with 542 secure servers per 1 million people. That’s quite a difference to over 13,000 servers per 1 million people in Gibraltar in 2010.

Also worth noting is that in 2001, both the USA and Canada made appearances on the top-10 chart, with 274 and 162 secure servers per 1 million people, respectively.

Lots of secure servers

Gilbraltar, with only 390 secure Internet websites in 2010, is a tiny speck on the Internet map, compared to the big nations, like United States. We admit, Gibraltar is not technically a country but a “British overseas territory,” but for the sake of this article we think we can safely include it nonetheless.

Clearly the number of secure Internet websites has increased dramatically over the last ten years, and we can only estimate that the growth since 2010 has been significant as well.

Top picture by VIA Gallery.

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As exciting as the game sounds, we missed the whole thing, instead spending our time watching the Superbowl.com website.

It turned out to be a rather dull thing to do because the site held up well and there was no downtime at all. The response time also didn’t give away anything significant in terms of online Super Bowl traffic.

Record breaking Super Bowl XLVI

This Super Bowl broke all kinds of records, including the highest tweet per second count. Fans all over the world managed to tweet 10,245 times per second at the half-time show with Madonna, and over 12,000 times per second at the conclusion of the game.

The highest Tweets per second #SuperBowl peak came at the end of the game: 12,233. 2nd highest was during Madonna’s performance: 10,245.

— Twitter (@twitter) February 6, 2012

There were also records set in terms of the actual game of football that was being played. Tom Coughlin, Giants,  became the oldest winning Super Bowl coach at 65. Tom Brady, Patriots, set four records, including most completions with 127 in his Super Bowl appearances so far.

Superbowl.com response time

After digging through the data provided by our Pingdom monitor probes, which checked on Superbowl.com once every minute, we can only conclude that the site held up well to what must have been significant traffic yesterday.

In our data we only included the results from our US-based probes, and although the monitoring of the Super Bowl site is ongoing, in the chart we’re only showing the response time for February 5, 2012. All times are EST.

As you can see, there was a speak in traffic for a couple of hours at the beginning of Super Bowl day, which we can only attribute to the US waking up and wanting to get up to date on what was happening.

Then response time was fairly even and took a slight dip before kick off at 6:30 pm. After the game, the response dropped even further, just to go back up at the end of the day. Average response time for yesterday was 259 ms.

The monitoring continues

We continue to monitor the Super Bowl website as well as many other sports sites around the world, and as soon as another major sports event rolls around, we’ll give you the latest on how the site is faring.

For now, let’s congratulate the New York Giants and the guys running Superbowl.com to a job well done.

This was a post from the guys at Pingdom, a site monitoring service that makes sure you're the first to know when your site is down. Check it out for free.

Kickoff is scheduled for 6:30 PM EST on Sunday, February 5, and we’re already monitoring Superbowl.com to see how the site will handle the event.

What team will win Super Bowl 46? How will the site cope? We can only wait to find out.

As you will watch the game to see if The Giants’ quarterback Eli Manning will finally step out of the shadows of his brother, Peyton Manning, we will see if the nuts, cables, and bolts at NFL.com holds up to the pressure on Sunday.

As you get the chili, chicken wings, and taco dip (and buffalo chicken Super Bowl cupcakes) ready for the action, eager to see if New York will snatch its fourth Super Bowl title (or if The Patriots can score its third title), we’re on top of checking major sports sites around the US, to see how the online part of the Super Bowl shakes out.

Will Sunday see a repeat of SuperBowl XLII from three years ago, when The Giants won 17-14 over the until-then undefeated Patriots?

Until Sunday, when we will get some answers, we leave you with the winner of the USA Today Ad Meter for best Super Bowl commercial from the game three years ago.

Cue the theme from Rocky.

Top photo by Elver Barnes.

This was a post from the guys at Pingdom, a site monitoring service that makes sure you're the first to know when your site is down. Check it out for free.

This week we bring you a collection of articles focusing on cloud, with a few other topics thrown in to boot.

This week’s suggested reading

• Windows Azure: Scott Guthrie at Microsoft publishes a series of articles about Windows Azure.
• Open Source File, Sync and Share Project Adds Cloud Text Editing and More: OwnCloud Version 3 introduces online editing, photo gallery, PDF viewer, application store and improvements to existing functionality.
• OpenStack removes Hyper-V support in next release: Microsoft appeared interested in maintaining support for Hyper-V in OpenStack, but developers decided to remove the buggy code.
• Amazon S3 Growth for 2011 – Now 762 Billion Objects: As of the end of 2011, there are 762 billion (762,000,000,000) objects in Amazon S3. We process over 500,000 requests per second for these objects at peak times.
• Cloud activity to explode in 2012: Tom Henderson writes for InfoWorld that key areas of growth in cloud activities include asset management, security monitoring, cloud service brokering, and service stacks.
• Intel Brings Bigger Guns to AMD Server Chip War: With Intel getting ready to launch its “Sandy Bridge” Xeon E5 processors in March and revving up its 22 nanometer processes to eventually field “Ivy bridge” kickers, Advanced Micro Devices is going to have to engineer some pretty impressive new Opteron server chips.
• Bruce Perens wore a suit and tie for his linux.conf.au 2012: His reason, “it reflects our community’s need to think more about how it appears to the rest of the world. Despite our many successes, he said, we have failed to achieve the goals that our community set for itself many years ago.”

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Photo by NS Newsflash.

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Whether this helped spur on the booming sales in the US, we don’t know, but retail e-commerce spending in the US reached $37.2 billion for the November to December 2011 period. That was an increase of 15% from the same period in 2010.

We decided to dig into the numbers for these e-commerce sites to see how well they did in terms of uptime and performance. After massaging the data coming from our Pingdom probes, it turns out that the sites overall performed well during December 2011 in terms of uptime, but response time was an issue for several sites.

Uptime per site

Out of the 59 sites we monitored, 28 show a perfect 100% uptime score with no downtime at all recorded by the Pingdom monitoring probes.

Notable outages included footlocker.com, which experienced an outage lasting 4 hours and 46 minutes on December 21, resulting in the lowest uptime in our study, 98.573%. Gamefly.com was not far behind with an outage of 4 hours and 44 minutes on December 16. Officedepot.com saw an outage of 3 hours and 15 minutes on December 4. For the rest of the sites in the bottom 10 for uptime during December 2011, their outages were short and distributed over the month.

Response time per site

When we ranked the sites according to average response time during December 2011, the picture doesn’t change all that much. All the sites in the top 10 in terms of average response time also had 100% uptime, except jcpenney.com, which had a 99.998% uptime.

One site that clearly sticks out, and not in a good way, is paypal.com. Even after thoroughly investigating why it had an average response time of 3,800 ms during December last year, we can’t find any other reason than that the site is just that slow. And note that paypal.com scored a 99.998% uptime during December.

Response time per day

According to ComScore, December 2011 had seven days that saw online sales above $1 billion per day. We were wondering if increased traffic on those seven days meant slower response time from the e-commerce sites. Here’s what it looks like when we calculate the average response time for all sites in our study for each day, in December 2011.

As you can see, there is no apparent relationship between how much was sold on a particular day and the average response time. There are also no sudden and major shifts in average response times, with two exceptions:

• December 9 to 10: We can’t find any particular reason for this being a busy online shopping time.
• December 22 to 23: December 23 was the last day customers in the US could place orders and have the goods delivered on time for Christmas. A last-minute rush to order things may explain the increase in response time.

This means there is no support for the notion that just because lots of goods and services are being sold, sites will deliver slower response times.

In fact, the average response time per day in December 2011 was 404 ms, and the average response time per day for the top 7 days in terms of online spending was 402 ms.

All in all, a good month for e-commerce

The monitoring of these sites continues, and we’re sure to return with another report in the future. We also add to and adapt the list of sites on a continuous basis, to be able to give you the most up-to-date and relevant results.

In this study, we were pleasantly surprised that 50% of the sites scored a perfect 100% uptime, and many of the sites also showed an impressive response time performance.

Did you do an online shopping during the holiday season last year? Were you annoyed or perhaps even disrupted by a slow site or a site that was down? Share your experience in the comments.

This was a post from the guys at Pingdom, a site monitoring service that makes sure you're the first to know when your site is down. Check it out for free.

• Welcome
• Updates on the progress of the Carbon Twitter app for Windows Phone. He’s getting ready to submit it again. Fingers crossed
• We’re joined by Mario Lurig, he introduces an article he wrote about using Amazon S3 and Cloudfront to speed up a website. One of Mario’s current projects is Dice Candies.

About the show

The show is hosted by Magnus Nystedt at Pingdom and Saleh Esmaeili, User Experience Designer at dots & lines in UAE, currently working on Carbon for Windows Phone and Android.

In each show we give out a discount code for our monitoring service. Listen to the show to catch that coupon and save some money.

Join us

We are always looking for interesting guests. If you want to join us, get in touch.

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Covering Q3 2011, the report again puts South Korea at the top of the list of countries with the fastest Internet connections. The country scored an average connection speed of 16.7 Mbps in Q3 2011.

Here’s what it looks like for the top 10 countries, with data going back to Q3 2007. Even though the USA on position 13 falls outside the top 10, we decided to include it for comparison.

The global average connection speed continued to increase in the third quarter of 2011, climbing 4.5% to 2.7 Mbps. If you look at the chart above, you can see that, over the entire period from Q3 2007, all countries enjoyed increasing speeds. Also, all countries have seen average speeds jump up and down between quarters, although the effect is much more noticeable for South Korea.

Overall, Akamai reported that the worldwide average connection speed increased in Q3, up 4.5% to 2.7 Mbps. South Korea saw a growth of over 10% in the quarter. Many other countries also enjoyed a growth during the quarter, including Hong Kong, Japan, Latvia, Switzerland, and the USA.

In total, Akamai noticed increased average speeds for 86 countries, and a decline for 47 countries. Out of the top 10 countries, only Romania saw a decline in the most recent quarter.

We know what you’re thinking, that South Korea rules the average connection speed, but some other country is faster in terms of top speed. We’re sorry to disappoint you, but even in peak connections, South Korea rules, with 46.8 Mbps.

An Internet user’s dream

It would seem like South Korea is somewhat of an Internet user’s dream. The country also enjoys a very high Internet penetration. According to the latest World Bank figures from 2010, 82.5% of South Koreans are online, ranking the country in 11^th place worldwide.

We will continue to monitor Internet connection speeds around the world using Akamai and other sources. Will South Korea continue to be number one? We’ll see.

This was a post from the guys at Pingdom, a site monitoring service that makes sure you're the first to know when your site is down. Check it out for free.

It seemed like everyone loved to hate poor Vista, enough to earn it a spot on the list of “Top ten terrible tech products.”

So today we can say happy fifth birthday to Windows Vista. But what does it look like around the world when it comes to the use of Vista? Is anyone still using the much-maligned OS?

Still more popular than Mac OS X

In StatCounter’s most recent figures for January 2012, Windows Vista is still the third most used OS in the world, commanding a 10.5% share of the desktop OS market. But Windows XP, released in 2001, lands at almost 35%, crushing its younger sibling.

And with Windows 7 at 44% worldwide, only about two and a half years after release, it would seem clear that users have wanted to avoid Vista, either by never upgrading, or upgrading just as fast as they can.

But that doesn’t mean Windows Vista is not used at all, far from it. In fact, looking at 216 countries around the world, using StatCounter’s data, it’s clear that many millions of people around the world still use Vista. In the map, the redder a country is, the more popular Windows Vista is there.

From this we get some key numbers:

• 84.2% – Out of the 216 countries included in our list, in 182 of them Windows Vista is the third most commonly used desktop OS, after Windows 7 and Windows XP.
• 19.06% – The highest percentage of Windows Vista usage is in Ireland.
• 1.03% – The lowest Windows Vista usage is in Cuba.
• 16 – The number of countries where Mac OS X is bigger than Windows Vista.
• 2 – The number of countries where Linux is bigger than Windows Vista.

What about Windows 8?

Even as Windows Vista celebrates its birthday, the OS is still hanging in there, with up to 20% of people browsing the web in some countries still using it.

Back in 2010, Windows 7 overtook Vista in just nine months. We can predict with quite some confidence that Windows 8, when it’s released later this year, will not overtake Windows 7 with the same speed.

If you’re still running Windows Vista, are you likely to upgrade to Windows 8 once it’s available?

This was a post from the guys at Pingdom, a site monitoring service that makes sure you're the first to know when your site is down. Check it out for free.