Trailblazers, creatives and innovators have taken the Internet to where it is today and made it an essential part of our everyday lives. We have selected a number of interesting “firsts” from the history of the Internet (and the Web) for your reading pleasure.

After all, if we can look back on March 10, 1876, when Alexander Graham Bell initiated the first phone call with the words “Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you,” we can surely have a look back at some more recent events that have shaped our lives.

These 15 firsts have been divided into three sections:

• Internet firsts – Notable firsts on the Internet.
• Web firsts – Notable firsts on the Web.
• Web service firsts – Firsts for a few notable web services.

Let’s get going!

Internet firsts

The first email

Ray Tomlinson is credited to having sent the first email back in 1971, and is also famous for having introduced the use of the @-symbol in email addresses to separate the name of the user from the name of the user’s machine. There had been similar systems since the early ‘60s but those had been limited exchanging messages with users on the same mainframe computer, but it wasn’t until 1971 that email started to look like it does today and could send emails over the network. Note that at this time, the Internet didn’t even exist, but its predecessor, ARPANET, did.

The first domain name

The first domain name ever registered on the Internet was “symbolics.com”. It was registered on March 15, 1985, by the now-defunct computer manufacturer Symbolics.

The first spam email

The first documented spam message was sent out to 393 recipients on ARPANET on May 3, 1978. The message was sent by Gary Thuerk and advertised the availability of a new model of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) computers. In other words, Gary Thuerk has the dubious honor of being the world’s first email spammer. It even earned him a spot in the Guinnes Book of World Records. Back in 1978, the term “spam” didn’t yet.

The first mobile phone with Internet access

The first mobile phone with Internet connectivity was the Nokia 9000 Communicator. It was launched in Finland back in 1996, but in truth the viability of accessing the Internet was at first limited by very high prices by the operators. In 1999, NTT DoCoMo launched i-Mode in Japan, which is considered the birth of mobile phone Internet services.

Web firsts

The first website

The first website (in late 1990) was info.cern.ch and ran on a NeXT computer at CERN. The first web page had the address http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html which contained information about the World Wide Web project. That specific page no longer exists but a later copy from 1992 is available on W3C’s site.

The first ecommerce site (and transaction)

Although it’s Amazon and eBay who became really big and famous, they weren’t the first ecommerce sites. Online retailer NetMarket claims to have conducted the first secure retail transaction on the Web. On August 11, 1994, the site sold a copy of the Sting CD Ten Summoner’s Tales for $12.48 plus shipping. Another contender for the crown is the Internet Shopping Network, which claims to have sold an item a whole month earlier.

The first online bank

The first financial institution to offer online internet banking services to all of its customers was Stanford Federal Credit Union in October, 1994.

The first search engine

Although Internet search engines had been around even before the WWW, they were limited in nature and usually only parsed page titles. The first full-text web search engine (like the ones we have today) was WebCrawler, launched back in 1994.

Above: Screenshot from 1996 of Webcrawler.com (via the Internet Archive).

The first blog

Justin Halls started a web-based diary called Justin’s Links from the Underground in 1994. It offered an early guided tour of the Web, but became increasingly personal over time. New York Times Magazine has referred to him as the founding father of personal blogging. Of course, the term “blog” itself wouldn’t be introduced until years later (“weblog” in 1997, which led to “blog” in 1999).

The first podcast

Following discussions in October 2000, blogging pioneer Dave Winer added functionality to RSS to include references to audio content inside RSS feeds, making syndication of audioblogging possible. On January 11, 2001, Winer demonstrated the new RSS functionality by enclosing a Grateful Dead song in his Scripting News blog. The last part of the equation, downloading the sound files to an iPod to listen to them, started to gain popularity in 2003. The term “podcasting” for portable listening to audioblogs was introduced in 2004.

Web service firsts

The first item sold on eBay

Back in 1995, when the site was founded, eBay was called AuctionWeb. The first item sold on the site was a broken laser pointer for $14.83. When asked in an email by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar if he was aware that the laser pointer was broken, the buyer replied that “I’m a collector of broken laser pointers.”

The first book sold on Amazon

The first book sold on Amazon.com (which started its service in 1995) was a book by Douglas Hofstadter called Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought.

The first edit on Wikipedia

The first edit on Wikipedia was a test edit with the text “Hello, World!” made by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, but it’s no longer available. The oldest surviving edit on Wikipedia is from January 16, 2001, adding data to a list of countries. (The exciting stuff obviously came later…)

The first video on YouTube

The first YouTube video was uploaded by YouTube cofounder Jawed Karim on April 23, 2005. It’s called “Me at the zoo” and is a video of him at the San Diego Zoo. It has been viewed more than 1.5 million times and is still available on the site.

The first message on Twitter

The first tweet recorded (and still existing) on Twitter was Jack Dorsey’s “just setting up my twttr” on March 21, 2006. Jack Dorsey is the man who came up with the idea for Twitter. And no, twttr isn’t a typo. For a short time Twitter was referred to as “twttr”, partly inspired by Flickr, and partly because its five characters could be used as an SMS short code.

Final (not first) words

Unfortunately it’s often easier said than done when you want to find out the first occurrence of something. Even for “young history” such as this, the details have often been lost in the mists of time. So, if you’re launching something innovative today and expect to make it big, make some notes for posterity to make articles such as these easier to make.

There can be no doubt that Facebook is pretty much unstoppable at the moment, a real juggernaut. For some perspective on Facebook’s amazing growth, we have put together this infographic. We hope you’ll enjoy it!

Take another look at that last number. That’s more than half a billion users, an incredibly large user base for a social network site, and it may not be too long before Facebook reaches it.

Data sources: The Facebook Blog for Facebook data and Wikipedia for country numbers.

Enter our new “report banners”.

Shareable report banners

With report banners we have made it easy for you to share uptime and response time stats for any of your monitored sites or servers. You can share them with anyone, regardless if they have a Pingdom account or not.

Here is what an uptime banner looks like:

And here is what a response time banner looks like:

There are two types of report banners:

• A “snapshot” banner for any time period of your choosing. It will not change over time.
• A “last 30 days” banner that will update once per hour.

You can create as many banners as you like.

Easy sharing of your monitoring data

The basic concept behind the report banners is to make it easy for you to share your monitoring data with others.

Since the resulting banners are images, you can include them almost anywhere. For example:

• On your website.
• In a blog post.
• In a forum discussion thread.
• In emails to colleagues and friends.
• Anywhere else you can attach or add an image.

Example 1: Imagine you’re speaking to your web hosting provider and want to show them how the response time of your website has deteriorated over the last month. Simply create a report banner that shows the response time for the last month and email it to them. An image often says more than a thousand words.

Example 2: Proudly show your webmaster colleagues or customers that your website has had 100% uptime over the last three months.

We could list hundreds of ways you could use the report banners. The possibilities are virtually endless.

Get started!

Report banners are easily created inside the Pingdom control panel in one of two ways:

1. Direct buttons in existing reports: You’ll notice that we have added buttons to your uptime and response time report pages, as shown here below. Clicking on the button will automatically create a “snapshot” banner for you for the time period and check you are viewing.

2. The Report Banners page: The other way is to use the Report Banners page to create a banner “from scratch”. On this page you can create either “snapshot” banners or “last 30 days” banners for any of the sites you’re monitoring. It’s still just a few simple clicks and is very easy to do.

We hope you’ll find this feature a useful addition to the Pingdom uptime monitoring service.

(If you don’t already have a Pingdom account, get one for free. That way you can monitor your website and get alerts when it has problems, view uptime and response time reports, get help with troubleshooting, and much more.)

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock lately, you’ll know that last week Apple announced the iPad, its new tablet device. Reactions have been a mixed bag, and a storm of discussion has swept through the blogosphere about various features the iPad should or shouldn’t have had.

One of the main complaints so far has been the iPad’s lack of multitasking. (To be precise, multitasking is a bit of a misnomer here; the iPhone OS has multitasking. What people really mean is only allowing one app at a time to run.)

Many seem to almost blindly assume that running only one app at a time is a Very Bad Thing, perhaps because limiting features tends to get negative reactions by default.

We thought it was worth pointing out that not everything about running one app at a time is bad. In fact, in many ways it’s quite the opposite if you think about it. There are actually quite a few upsides to the “one app at a time” approach that Apple has taken:

• Ease of development: You could argue that the lack of multitasking is limiting developers. But it is also enabling them. Developers can work on and test their apps with the safe assumption that they will have access to a certain amount of RAM and CPU. This is better for developers, because they know their app can take full advantage of the device and won’t have to compete for resources with other apps. We’ve seen this sentiment expressed by some iPhone game developers, and it actually makes sense. It mimics, in a way, the way game consoles work: dedicate system resources to one app at a time.
• Consistent app performance: Not having apps compete for device resources also means that apps are more likely to perform well and consistently, which makes for a better user experience.
• A more stable platform: The more processes from various developers that are running in the background at the same time, the more likely something is to crash and cause problems. Only running one app at a time also minimizes the risk of inter-application problems. Once again, a win for the user experience.
• Less battery drain: The only credible argument for running more than one app at a time is for running background processes, but on top of the reasons we have already listed, having a bunch of apps and processes working in the background would limit battery life significantly.
• These are “one app at a time” devices: The iPhone OS devices (iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch) are small and focus is meant to be on one app at a time anyway. The iPad is the biggest and still only has a nine-inch screen, not something you want to clutter with more than one app at a time. As long as switching between apps is fast, and it is, running one app at a time shouldn’t be a problem.

We may be playing Devil’s Advocate a bit here, but it’s worth taking a step back and really think about this. Traditional wisdom isn’t always right, and let’s face it, the iPad isn’t meant as a replacement for your desktop computer, or even your laptop. So perhaps we shouldn’t judge it like one.

All of the reasons we listed above have one thing in common. They all add to the user experience, not by adding more features or bling, but by limiting the risk of the user being inconvenienced or interrupted. Perhaps Apple’s reason for not including multitasking is as simple as wanting to conserve battery power, but there’s also a good chance that it’s a tradeoff to improve the user experience, for the very reasons we listed in this article.

An alternative to multitasking. If only allowing one application at a time to run is a decision that Apple has decided to stand by in the long run, most likely they will do something (hopefully clever) to compensate for this. Perhaps they will extend the current notification functionality and make it more powerful and flexible for apps to use.

To find out, we went through the Forbes 400, a list of the wealthiest Americans, and filtered out the people who work within the tech field, or more specifically: IT.

So here they are, the 20 richest Americans in tech today.

1. Bill Gates, Microsoft, $50 billion

Age: 53

Full name, William Henry Gates III. Not only is he the wealthiest in tech, he is the wealthiest person in the world, period. These days he has cut back his role in Microsoft significantly, instead focusing on his philanthropy via the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundations which he established with the main goals to improve healthcare and reduce extreme poverty in the world.

2. Larry Ellison, Oracle, $27 billion

Age: 65

Full name, Lawrence Joseph Ellison. He is the co-founder and CEO of Oracle, the database giant. He is the third richest American, and the fourth richest person in the world. Interesting side note: He took Oracle public the day before Microsoft in 1986, which kind of stole his thunder. Together with David Geffen, he owns one of the world’s largest yachts, which cost over $200 million to build.

3. Sergey Brin, Google, $15.3 billion

Age: 36

Full name, Sergey Mikhailovic Brin. He is the co-founder and technology president of Google. Born in Russia, Brin immigrated to the US at age six. He met Larry Page while at Stanford, where the two of them worked on the search technology that would become Google, which they finally started up in a rented garage after leaving their PhD studies in computer science. And the rest is history. Both Brin and Page have a yearly salary of one dollar from Google. In 2009, Brin was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering for his accomplishments.

4. Larry Page, Google, $15.3 billion

Age: 36

Full name, Lawrence Page. He is the co-founder and product president of Google. While at Stanford, Page started Backrub, his PhD research project, and was soon joined by Sergey Brin. Together they worked on the PageRank algorithm (its name a tongue-in-cheek reference to Larry Page), which is what ultimately led to the creation of Google.

5. Michael Dell, Dell, $14.5 billion

Age: 44

Full name, Michael Saul Dell. He is the founder and CEO of Dell. Ironically, for a man that’s made his fortune building Windows PCs, his first encounter with a computer was a Mac. Aged 15, he broke down a brand new Apple II computer and rebuilt it, just to see if he could.

6. Steve Ballmer, Microsoft, $13.3 billion

Age: 53

Steven Ballmer is the current CEO of Microsoft. He originally joined Microsoft as employee number 30 (according to Forbes, 24 according to Wikipedia) back in 1980, where he became the company’s first business manager. He has been Microsoft’s CEO since 2000.

7. Paul Allen, Microsoft, $11.5 billion

Age: 56

Full name, Paul Gardner Allen. Although he is no longer with the company, he is perhaps best known for founding Microsoft together with Bill Gates. He is also a very active philanthropist, funding scientific research within a wide variety of fields such as astronomy and neuroscience. In 2007 and 2008 he was listed among the 100 Most Influential People in the World by Time Magazine.

8. Jeff Bezos, Amazon, $8.8 billion

Age: 45

Full name, Jeffrey Preston Bezos. He is the founder, chairman and CEO of Amazon.com. Bezos worked as a financial analyst before he founded Amazon back in 1994. He was Time Magazine’s Man of the Year in 1999, and in 2008 he was singled out as one of America’s Best Leaders by the US News and World Report.

9. Jim Goodnight, SAS Institute, $6.8 billion

Age: 66

Full name, James Goodnight. He cofounded SAS Institute in 1976, a company that develops business intelligence software. He has been named as one of the 20th Century’s Great American Business Leaders by Harvard Business School. SAS Institute is widely believed to be the largest privately held software maker in the world.

10. Eric Schmidt, Google, $5.5 billion

Age: 54

Full name, Eric Emerson Schmidt. He is a former CTO of Sun and former CEO of Novell. These days, he is chairman and CEO of Google. He was also elected to Apple’s board of directors 2006, but resigned in 2009 due to the increasing competition between Google and Apple. In 2007, he topped PC World’s list of the 50 Most Important People on the Web (together with Larry Page and Sergey Brin).

11. Steve Jobs, Apple, $5.1 billion

Age: 54

Full name, Steven Paul Jobs. He is the cofounder and CEO of Apple. He is also the former owner and CEO of Pixar, which sold to Disney in 2006. He has since then been a member of Disney’s board of directors, and he’s Disney’s single largest shareholder with approximately 7% of its stock. In 2007, Fortune Magazine ranked him as the most powerful person in business. In 2009, the same magazine named him CEO of the decade.

12. Gordon Moore, Intel, $3.7 billion

Age: 80

Full name, Gordon Earle Moore. He is the cofounder and former chairman and CEO of Intel (founded in 1968), now retired. He is the man behind the famous Moore’s Law, which he published in an article in Electronics Magazine in 1965. In 2008 he was awarded the IEEE Medal of Honor for his pioneering role in the microprocessor and semiconductor industry.

13. John Sall, SAS Institute, $3.4 billion

Age: 61

John Sall cofounded SAS Institute together with James Goodnight (and two others), and today owns one third of the company. The other two thirds are owned by Goodnight. Sall and Goodnight met as graduate students at North Carolina State University.

14. David Sun, Kingston, $2.5 billion

Age: 58

David Sun, a Taiwan immigrant, cofounded Kingston Technology together with John Tu in 1987. Both David Sun and John Tu continue to work in cubicles at the center of the sales floor.

15. John Tu, Kingston, $2.5 billion

Age: 67

John Tu is the cofounder and president of Kingston Technology, which he founded together with fellow Taiwan immigrant David Sun (see above). Kingston Technology is today the largest privately held American memory maker.

16. Jack Dangermond, ESRI, $2 billion

Age: 64

Jack Dangermond founded the mapping software company Environmental Systems Research Institute together with his wife Laura in 1969. ESRI is the world’s largest Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software company, and Dangermond has received numerous awards for the influence of his work.

17. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook, $2 billion

Age: 25

Full name, Mark Elliot Zuckerberg. He is the cofounder and CEO of social network phenomenon Facebook, which started in 2004 and now has more than 350 million users. At just 25 years of age, he is the youngest member of the Forbes 400 list. In fact, he is the youngest self-made billionaire in the world.

18. Thomas M. Siebel, Siebel Systems, $1.7 billion

Age: 56

Thomas Siebel is the founder of CRM maker Siebel Systems, which he started in 1993. He later sold it to Oracle in 2005. This was slightly ironic considering he had left Oracle in 1990 when Larry Ellison had refused to bring his sales-tracking software to market, which is exactly what led him to found Siebel Systems. He is a very active philanthropist through his Siebel Foundation. In 2009, Barron’s ranked him as number five of the World’s Top 25 Philanthropists.

19. Bharat Desai, Syntel, $1.65 billion

Age: 56

Bharat Desai is the founder of Syntel, a global provider of IT outsourcing. He was born in Kenya, spent his teens in India, and later moved to the US. In 1996, USA Today named him Entrepreneur of the Year, and in 1999, Harvard Business School gave him the Michigan Entrepreneur Award.

20. Henry Samueli, Broadcom, $1.65 billion

Age: 55

Henry Samueli is the cofounder, senior vice president and CTO of the Broadcom Corporation, started in 1991 together with Henry Nicholas. He is also the owner of the Anaheim Ducks in the NHL.

Data sources: Forbes and Wikipedia.

Photo credits: Gordon Moore by Steve Jurvetson. David Sun and John Tu courtesy of Kingston Technology. Mark Zuckerberg by Raphaël Labbé. John Sall courtesy of SAS Institute. Henry Samueli courtesy of Broadcom. Jack Dangermond by Jim Harper. Bharat Desai courtesy of Syntel. Larry Page by Marcin Mycielski. Michael Dell by Joi Ito. Jim Goodnight by the World Economic Forum. Jeff Bezos by James Duncan Davidson. Larry Ellison courtesy of Oracle. Steve Ballmer by Martin Olsson. Paul Allen by Michael Sprague. Steve Jobs by Matthew Yohe. Sergey Brin by Joi Ito. Bill Gates by Severin Nowacki, World Economic Forum. Eric Schmidt by Charles Haynes.

This is where YOU come in. We are looking for a few brave, kick-ass web developers and a masterful web designer to join our ranks here in Sweden. In return we can offer you a creative environment and the chance to work with some of the brightest minds in the business.

(We believe that working closely together is important, so we’re looking for people who can work full time here at our office. In other words, we’re not interested in freelancers or outsourcing deals.)

• Web developers: If you thrive on interesting, technical challenges and can program with the best of them, we’d love to hear from you.
• Web designers: If you are a usability guru and eat HTML, CSS and Photoshop for breakfast, we’d love to hear from you too.

So, if you think working at one of the most popular uptime monitoring services in the world sounds like fun (it is), check out the details on the “Work at Pingdom” page and get in touch!

Great products and services often come about more or less by accident and coincidence. The business world sees this kind of thing happening all the time. It’s actually not all that unusual that a company morphs an initial product into something it wasn’t originally intended to be. Because the truth is that it’s not easy to predict how something will be used, or what people will respond to.

And of course, companies need to adapt to survive. For example, Nokia started out making rubber boots (waaay back in the day), not mobile phones. Nintendo started out making playing cards, not video game consoles. AOL started out as an online service for gaming computers in the early ‘80s.

This also applies to our modern world of the Internet and the Web. Online services change and adapt, and what works, sticks, even if it didn’t match the original vision of its creators. Here are a few prominent examples of successful products and services that were originally just an afterthought to the people who created them.

Flickr

What would become the highly popular photo-sharing site Flickr originally started as the instant messaging part of a web-based multiplayer game called Game Neverending. The photo sharing element of that turned out to be very popular, and ultimately the game’s creators ditched the game and focused on Flickr instead.

Above: Screenshot from Game Neverending (by Cal Henderson), which gave birth to Flickr.

Craigslist

Craigslist began life in 1995 as a mailing list of friends run as a hobby by Craig Newmark (hence the name “Craigslist”) for posting about local social events in San Francisco. The mailing list wasn’t moderated, and to Newmark’s surprise people started using it for posting about jobs, and from there more categories started to grow. In 1996 he turned the mailing list into a simple web-based service because the mailing list members had started asking for a web interface.

Twitter

Twitter started its life inside a company called Odeo which at the time was a podcasting service. The idea for Twitter was famously cracked during a one-day brainstorming session to come up with some form of application to complement Odeo’s podcasting service, which was struggling a bit.

Twitter was initially just used internally at Odeo and among friends and relatives of the staff. Within a year of becoming publicly available in 2006 it proved so popular that Twitter was turned into its own company and Odeo was basically left by the wayside.

Above: Early sketch by Jack Dorsey of the Twitter service (photo by Jack Dorsey).

Facebook

The seed that would ultimately grow into the social network site Facebook started as a “hot or not” site called Facemash, using directory photos from the various Harvard house facebooks. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg created Facemash in his dorm room at Harvard University, more or less out of boredom.

The Facemash site was shut down within days by the Harvard administration, but after an editorial in the student newspaper about the Facemash incident pointed out that a centralized website for students wasn’t a bad idea, Zuckerberg began work on “Thefacebook” (Facebook’s initial name).

Above: Screenshot of “Thefacebook” (from Wikipedia).

Linux (ok, not an online service at all, but…)

Ok, it’s not an online service at all, but we’re still including Linux because it’s such a great example of something very small that exploded into something huge in an unexpected way.

In 1991 when Linus Torvalds started work on what would become the Linux kernel, no one suspected the impact it would have. It was simply a nice little hobby project for him to work on. He didn’t even think of it in the terms of an OS kernel initially; at first it was just a terminal emulator he was working on.

When the Linux kernel was created, it turned out to fit perfectly into a project called the GNU Operating System, becoming the foundation of a complete OS that over time has become hugely popular.

Conclusion

The above services (and Linux) all started out as something different from what they ultimately became.

There is an important lesson in this, aside from how difficult it is to see the true potential of what you create. It shows how vital it is to be flexible, having a mind that is never too set in its ways or too fixated on any one single plan or course of action.

Top image credit: Tales of the Unexpected (old TV series) title image found at TVARK.

Most country code top-level domains on the Internet represent areas with millions of people, such as .uk (United Kingdom), .ca (Canada), .de (Germany), .se (Sweden), and so on, but there a places where the population isn’t counted in the millions, or even thousands, that still have their very own top-level domain on the Internet. Some of them aren’t even inhabited.

IANA, the organization that administers the domain name system, bases its allocation of country code top-level domains on the standard country code list in ISO 3166-1 which defines codes for “the names of countries, dependent territories, and special areas of geographical interest.”

The IANA is not in the business of deciding what is and what is not a country. The selection of the ISO 3166 list as a basis for country code top-level domain names was made with the knowledge that ISO has a procedure for determining which entities should be and should not be on that list. ( – Jon Postel, RFC 1591)

This has led to some really interesting situations with top-level domains (TLDs) for places where no one actually lives, or with very tiny populations.

TLDs for 10 places with tiny populations

We have sorted them by population size, smallest first.

.hm – Heard and McDonald Islands

Population: 0

A territory of Australia, the Heard and McDonald Islands is a group of barren, uninhabited volcanic islands in the middle of the ocean between Africa and Antarctica. The main reason there are any domain names registered for .hm is that it’s been marketed as a “home” address.

.pn – Pitcairn Islands

Population: 50

The Pitcairn Islands consists of four volcanic islands in the southern Pacific Ocean and is a former British colony. It’s the home of the descendants of the Bounty mutineers.

.tf – French Southern and Antarctic Lands

Population: 140

A number of islands spread over a rather large area of the Indian Ocean between Africa and Australia. There is no permanent population; merely a group of military personnel, scientists, officials and support staff.

.cc – Cocos (Keeling) Islands

Population: 596

A territory of Australia, the Cocos Islands is a group of islands located in the Indian Ocean about halfway between India and Australia. The .cc TLD is also used by the Turkish part of Cyprus, mainly because only Turkey recognizes it as a sovereign state so it won’t get its own TLD.

.va – Vatican City

Population: 826

Vatican City is of course the well-known walled city-state within Rome that serves as the high seat of the Catholic Church.

.ac – Ascension Island

Population: 940

Ascension Island is a volcanic island in the South Atlantic Ocean and is a territory of the United Kingdom. It is home to one of five ground antennas that assist in the operation of the Global Positioning System (GPS).

.aq – Antarctica

Population: 1,000 – 5,000

Antarctica has no permanent population; the only people in Antarctica are scientists living for periods of time in various research stations scattered over the continent. The .aq TLD is reserved for use by organizations that are conducting work in or promoting Antarctica.

.nu – Niue

Population: 1,398

An island nation just northeast of New Zealand, commonly known as the “Rock of Polynesia”. Since “nu” means “now” in Swedish, Danish and Dutch, .nu has been successfully marketed in Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands and Belgium.

.tk – Tokelau

Population: 1,416

A territory of New Zealand, Tokelau consists of three islands in the southern Pacific Ocean north of New Zealand.

.io – British Indian Ocean Territory

Population: 3,500

Also known as Chagos Islands, it’s a territory of the United Kingdom. It’s a group of islands located about halfway between Africa and Indonesia. The population almost exclusively consists of a joint military outpost for the United Kingdom and United States.

Final words

Compare the above top-level domains with .in – India, population: 1.2 billion – and .cn – China, population: 1.3 billion. A wee bit of a difference.

Photo credit: Satellite photo by NASA

What happened with the Internet in 2009?

How many websites were added? How many emails were sent? How many Internet users were there? This post will answer all of those questions and many more. Prepare for information overload, but in a good way.

We have used a wide variety of sources from around the Web. A full list of source references is available at the bottom of the post for those interested. We here at Pingdom also did some additional calculations to get even more numbers to show you.

Enjoy!

Email

• 90 trillion – The number of emails sent on the Internet in 2009.
• 247 billion – Average number of email messages per day.
• 1.4 billion – The number of email users worldwide.
• 100 million – New email users since the year before.
• 81% – The percentage of emails that were spam.
• 92% – Peak spam levels late in the year.
• 24% – Increase in spam since last year.
• 200 billion – The number of spam emails per day (assuming 81% are spam).

Websites

• 234 million – The number of websites as of December 2009.
• 47 million – Added websites in 2009.

Web servers

• 13.9% – The growth of Apache websites in 2009.
• -22.1% – The growth of IIS websites in 2009.
• 35.0% – The growth of Google GFE websites in 2009.
• 384.4% – The growth of Nginx websites in 2009.
• -72.4% – The growth of Lighttpd websites in 2009.

Domain names

• 81.8 million – .COM domain names at the end of 2009.
• 12.3 million – .NET domain names at the end of 2009.
• 7.8 million – .ORG domain names at the end of 2009.
• 76.3 million – The number of country code top-level domains (e.g. .CN, .UK, .DE, etc.).
• 187 million – The number of domain names across all top-level domains (October 2009).
• 8% – The increase in domain names since the year before.

Internet users

• 1.73 billion – Internet users worldwide (September 2009).
• 18% – Increase in Internet users since the previous year.
• 738,257,230 – Internet users in Asia.
• 418,029,796 – Internet users in Europe.
• 252,908,000 – Internet users in North America.
• 179,031,479 – Internet users in Latin America / Caribbean.
• 67,371,700 – Internet users in Africa.
• 57,425,046 – Internet users in the Middle East.
• 20,970,490 – Internet users in Oceania / Australia.

Social media

• 126 million – The number of blogs on the Internet (as tracked by BlogPulse).
• 84% – Percent of social network sites with more women than men.
• 27.3 million – Number of tweets on Twitter per day (November, 2009)
• 57% – Percentage of Twitter’s user base located in the United States.
• 4.25 million – People following @aplusk (Ashton Kutcher, Twitter’s most followed user).
• 350 million – People on Facebook.
• 50% – Percentage of Facebook users that log in every day.
• 500,000 – The number of active Facebook applications.

Images

• 4 billion – Photos hosted by Flickr (October 2009).
• 2.5 billion – Photos uploaded each month to Facebook.
• 30 billion – At the current rate, the number of photos uploaded to Facebook per year.

Videos

• 1 billion – The total number of videos YouTube serves in one day.
• 12.2 billion – Videos viewed per month on YouTube in the US (November 2009).
• 924 million – Videos viewed per month on Hulu in the US (November 2009).
• 182 – The number of online videos the average Internet user watches in a month (USA).
• 82% – Percentage of Internet users that view videos online (USA).
• 39.4% – YouTube online video market share (USA).
• 81.9% – Percentage of embedded videos on blogs that are YouTube videos.

Web browsers

Malicious software

• 148,000 – New zombie computers created per day (used in botnets for sending spam, etc.)
• 2.6 million – Amount of malicious code threats at the start of 2009 (viruses, trojans, etc.)
• 921,143 – The number of new malicious code signatures added by Symantec in Q4 2009.

Data sources: Website and web server stats from Netcraft. Domain name stats from Verisign and Webhosting.info. Internet user stats from Internet World Stats. Web browser stats from Net Applications. Email stats from Radicati Group. Spam stats from McAfee. Malware stats from Symantec (and here) and McAfee. Online video stats from Comscore, Sysomos and YouTube. Photo stats from Flickr and Facebook. Social media stats from BlogPulse, Pingdom (here and here), Twittercounter, Facebook and GigaOm.

According to a new study by TeleGeography, worldwide international telephone traffic racked up 406 billion minutes of call time in 2009. Contrast this with international call traffic between Skype users (free over the Internet), which was 54 billion minutes, up from 33 billion minutes the previous year.

Now here comes the really amazing thing: If you count international calls between Skype users in with the overall international telephone calls, Skype’s share of the pie is almost 12%.

“The volume of traffic routed via Skype is tremendous,” says Stephan Beckert, a TeleGeography analyst. “Skype is now the largest provider of cross border communications in the world, by far.”

And here is another kicker: Skype’s actual share is bound to be even higher than 12%.

Why? Because the numbers above only include calls between Skype users. They don’t include SkypeOut calls, Skype’s Internet-to-telephone pay option. For example, in Q3 2009, Skype had 3.1 billion minutes of SkypeOut calls. Not all will have been international calls, but it’s not an insignificant amount of calling time (12.4 billion minutes in a year).

You could argue that Skype’s incredible growth is a sign of what many have predicted for some time now; sooner or later all calls will be made over the Internet. It’s just a matter of time.