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World sends 107 trillion emails in 2010, most of them about enlarging your stock portfolio
Hold on to your seats, stat lovers, 2010 is about to hit you with the full force of its quantifiable web exploits. Web monitoring site Pingdom reports that last year we all sent 107 trillion emails to our loved and unloved ones, which breaks down to 294 billion per day, though only 10.9 percent of those weren't spam. There are now 1.88 billion email users around the globe and when they're not too busy communicating, they're surfing one of the net's 255 million total sites (21.4 million of which are said to have arrived in 2010). The compendium of numerical knowledge wraps up with a look at social media, where Twitter still has a way to go before catching up with email -- there were only 25 billion tweets last year -- but continues to grow like mad, having added 100 million users during the year. Facebook added even more, 250 million users, and its thriving population is sharing 30 billion pieces of content (links, pics, video, etc.) each and every month. This isn't madness, this is the internet.
Pingdom brings Apple Store downtime hysteria to your website
Every time the Apple Store has some downtime, magic seems to happen, especially if it happens to be a Tuesday. Not surprisingly, we get a flood of emails from excited readers a few minutes after the yellow sticky note goes up, letting us know that we better be on our toes when the store comes back up. Follow that with some obsessive site-checking and collectively, that's a lot of manual labor. It's about time we started automating the process. Pingdom, purveyors of website monitoring services, have produced a badge that puts the status of the Apple Store on your web page, blog, and maybe your dashboard with a web clipping. Pingdom does the work of pinging the Apple Store once per minute to determine its current state, and provides you with an image indicating up or down which is embedded in an iFrame. Simple, but effective. So, save the wear and tear on your mouse and grab the badge rather than hitting refresh all morning this Tuesday. Pingdom also has a downtime history going, and an analysis of Apple's "marketing by downtime." After all, it is quite a well-planned marketing scheme, if not a growing national pastime for Apple fans.
