If you list the top 100 sites in the world (according to Alexa), you’ll find that 23 are owned by Google. That’s a massive share for a single company.

How does Google have such a huge presence? The main reason is the large number of localized versions of Google Search, such as Google.com, Google.co.uk, Google.fr, Google.de, etc. Nearly every public has one, and due to their popularity, 17 are among the top 100 most visited sites on the Internet.

Then there’s also YouTube, Blogger, etc.

The number is boosted a bit by a couple of “sites” that aren’t regular sites, googleusercontent.com being one. This is a side effect of how Alexa works, which seems to focus on domains accessed, so things like CDNs (content delivery networks) get included. This doesn’t change much, though, because even ignoring those domains you still end up with 20 proper, Google-owned sites. That’s one in five.

We noticed this rather impressive statistic the additional day while effective on a report in this area web server usage, and felt it was worth mentioning here.

There’s so much talk in this area how huge Facebook has become (and deservedly so), but Google will be a tough giant to beat in terms of sheer web presence. It’s still one of the world’s most fascinating companies.

P.S. A year ago we wrote a related article – How huge is Google, really? – that you might want to check out for a deeper dive into Google’s giant online presence.

Data source: Top sites from Alexa, May 14.

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23 of the top 100 sites are Google-owned

Earlier this week we studied what countries around the world had lost and gained the most Facebook users over the past 6 months. With Facebook going public today, we thought we’d take a instant look at where the social arrangement has the utmost potential for growth.

So we posed this question: what if Facebook had the same penetration in Africa and Asia as it does in Europe and North America? How many users would the social arrangement have then?

The numbers are pretty staggering.

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Facebook’s incredible growth potential

George Orwell’s arguably most well-known novel, the dystopian Nineteen Eighty-Four, coined a number of phrases that are in widespread use today. One of them was “Huge Brother,” an authority figure who watches every go you make, everywhere. The term has become synonymous with mass surveillance. As you can imagine, the book is easily as relevant today as it was back in 1949 when it was initially published. (It’s a fantastic read, btw.)

The usual complaints in this area modern-era Huge Brothers – aside from that annoying reality show – tend to be targeted at initiatives to house more surveillance cameras in various locations (e.g. the camera-riddled London). Then of course there is the monitoring of our actions on the Internet by governments, ISPs and organizations with their own agendas.

Today, though, something completely different is experience, and surprisingly few red flags have been raised. We, the collective, are providing the raw surveillance data. We, not some dystopian disorder, are becoming the ones who monitor.

How is this experience? The key is your smartphone. Or perhaps we should say, your social use of your smartphone.

Rise of the collective Huge Brother

You like your smartphone, right? You like having constant Internet access, your social apps always at hand, a camera, a video camera, and more, all in your pocket. And you use it a lot.

We’re getting used to a life increasingly under public scrutiny, and we’re getting used to sharing. Just a few years ago, none of us were sharing as much in this area ourselves, or others, as we are today. We, the collective social media user base, are building an giant database of what is essentially a kind of surveillance data.

Capture from the film version of 1984, via Wikipedia.

Many of us keep taking photos and maybe even videos of friends, ourselves and locations we hang out in or visit. Then we upload them to Facebook, Chirrup, Instagram, and many additional places.

Not only that, all this sharing often comes with attached location in rank and timestamps. This on top of the dedicated check-ins many do on Facebook and Foursquare. Then add the various tagging of pictures that is done on sites like Facebook (you know, tagging friends in photos).

Not all of us are doing this, but enough of us are. Collectively, we are providing the social networks with a wealth of in rank that can be accessed today via various public APIs. Pictures, videos, status updates, all with attached timestamps and location in rank.

We, the monitors

Although anyone with a bit of imagination can probably reckon up a dozen diabolical abuses of the data we grant to social networks, let’s take a couple of more mundane examples of things that are by now experience.

For example, when you apply for a job, there is a excellent chance that your prospective employer will check you out online, search for pictures of you in various situations, see what public you hang with, etc. Companies have been doing this for years. Not all, but the practice is common enough.

Another example is simply a practical significance. House burglars can see when you’re not at home if you share your location online. As many as 4 out of 5 do this by now. One of the truly nasty side effects of location sharing.

Then there is the infamous Girls Around Me app, which was in creepy league of its own while it existed. The name pretty much speaks for itself.

The Girls Around Me app was yanked from the iOS app store, but there are still apps like Banjo, which also drags in location data from various social networks. Public don’t even have to “check in” anywhere, they simply show up based on the location included in their latest status updates or pictures. This is not aggregated, anonymized data; actual individuals populate the app.

There is a vast amount of collective “surveillance” data out there, and we keep adding to it. It is by now technically possible to mine much of this shared data as a third party from various social networks via APIs. Apps like Banjo and Girls Like Me make this exceedingly clear.

Life in public is by now changing our behavior

Here’s a very relevant anecdote of how our behavior is changing as a direct result of this collective surveillance.

Even if you’re not American you’ve probably heard in this area Spring Break, usually to the top with wild partying, wet t-shirt contests, etc. Here’s the fascinating the part: recently, these parties have started to cool down.

Why? Because now that everyone has a smartphone or at least a feature phone with a camera, you can’t go wild and not have it documented and uploaded to the Internet. College students are well aware of this, and don’t want to look terrible.

Facial recollection could take things to a new level

There’s also an elephant in the room, facial recollection. The technology by now exists and is in limited use in various applications such as iPhoto, Picasa and even Facebook. Facial recollection applied broadly on social arrangement data would open up a whole new can of worms.

Here is a scenario: Imagine taking a picture in a restaurant or at a party, or even in the street. Now imagine facial recollection being applied to it, coupling everyone in the shot with a database of public. We could get a list of everyone in the shot, even public in the periphery who you don’t know or care in this area, public unaware they were having their picture full.

Now imagine this being done routinely on all pictures on Facebook, where billions of photos are uploaded every month. Then combine it with the timestamps on these photos, and the location in rank.

Mind. Blown. At least it should be. You could footstep the actions of basically anyone this way, even if they don’t participate in social networks.

Oh, and then there’s voice recollection…

Conclusion

Privacy is an illusion these days. You don’t have to be a total privacy nut to see that. It also doesn’t take a genius to see that our collective in rank sharing is only increasing. An abundance of CCTV cameras aren’t necessary, we’re by now monitoring ourselves. We grant the data, and many of us are by now using it.

The question isn’t if a name will start abusing all this data, but when.

There’s a sticker on a radar screen in the movie Battleship which says, “In God We Trust, Everyone Else We Monitor.” It seemed appropriate to end with that.

Picture credits: Red Huge Brother top picture and the Face via Shutterstock.

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How smartphones and social networks are turning us into a collective Huge Brother

As you may have heard, Facebook very recently passed 900 million active users. We reckon it’s pretty safe to say that it’s by far the largest social arrangement in history.

That number, 900 million, is hard to get your head around. It’s such a huge number. We thought it would be fun to illustrate it with a clean small infographic. Delight in!

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Putting Facebook’s 900 million users into perspective (infographic)

This week we thought you would be interested in reading in this area what’s experience with the worldwide adoption of IPv6, effective up to the World IPv6 Launch Day on June 6.

Every Friday we bring you a collection of links to places on the web that we find particularly newsworthy, fascinating, entertaining, and topical. We try to focus on some particular area or topic each week, but in general we will cover Internet, web development, networking, performance, wellbeing, and additional geeky topics.

This week’s suggested reading in this area IPv6

• IPv6 wellbeing a on the rise interest as Blue Coat, Akamai note malware, exploits: The wellbeing issue of the moment is that IPv6 opens endpoints into and out of a company’s arrangement that may not be adequately monitored–or monitored at all.
• Measuring Worldwide Growth in IPv6 Deployments: The percentage of IPv6-enabled networks has increased in all regions. And what is striking is that, although their start and end positions are different, the growth curves for all five regions is remarkably similar.
• Europe Leads the Way in IPv6 Adoption: Norway takes the top spot, after a huge community effort to promote the need to become IPv6 ready within the public. The second and third positions are full by the Netherlands and Malaysia. Six of the top 10 countries are located in the RIPE NCC service region (Europe, Central Asia and parts of the Middle East).
• Facebook Enabling IPv6 Access For Developers Next Month: Another week, another Facebook Operation Developer Update to keep us all updated on the changes coming to the platform. This week is light in news but what is there packs a punch. Those interested in Facebook’s IPv6 plans will want to especially pay attention.
• The sorry disorder of federal IPv6 support: U.S. federal government agencies must meet an aggressive deadline of Sept. 30, 2012, to deploy IPv6 on their public-facing websites, under an Obama administration initiative. But with less than five months to go, more than 99% of federal websites aren’t supporting the next-gen Internet Protocol on their DNS, email and Web services.
• With World IPv6 Launch, IPv6 on by defaulting will be the new normal: World IPv6 Launch looms large. It’s coming to a worldwide computer arrangement near you on June 6.
• IPv6 – How to deal with new Internet Protocol upgrade: IPv6 has been a hot topic in the networking industry for over a year now and as the changeover progresses, it is still a priority for companies.
• Apple under fire for backing off IPv6 support: Apple Computer came under fire for back-pedaling on its support for IPv6, the next-generation Internet Protocol, at a gathering of experts held in Denver.
• And we end with something less honest:
• The nanobots ran out of addresses

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Weekend must-read articles #12 – IPv6

Did you look at your website on the new iPad yet? We have browsed quite a few sites by now on that gorgeous 2048 by 1536 pixel show, and we can categorically disorder that the future has arrived.

But whether that future is all bright remains to be seen.

Early signs seem to indicate that we’ll have to endure more bloat, with the possibility that the average size of a web page balloons to nearly 5 MB from the 1.1 MB average today.

It will “wreak havoc on the web”

Brad Frost claimed that the new iPad will “wreak havoc on the web” in a recent blog post. It will do so because graphics have to be updated in order to really shine on the new show.

To take full advantage of all those pixels – four times as many as on the previous iPads – app developers as well as web designers will have to pack more pixels into the graphics used in apps and web pages.

But we’re not really talking in this area apps, for which Apple has by now raised the over-the-air download limit to 50 MB; we’re talking in this area web pages.

Apparently Apple has by now started to dish out graphics with twice the pledge to anyone browsing in to Apple.com using the new iPad. Jason Grigsby did some testing and found that the total size of the Apple.com page increases from 502 kB to 2.13 MB when the retina version of metaphors are loaded.

That’s an increase of a whopping 324%!

With the bloat we are by now suffering from, we wonder if this is precious bandwidth resources well spent.

Looking at the 1,000 most recent tests with the Pingdom Full Page Test Tool, the average page size is 1.1 MB, which is really a pretty excellent size for a web page.

With the same percentage growth as for Apple.com per Jason Grigsby’s test, the average size of a web page would then be 4.7 MB.

Yikes – the average web page could be nearly 5 MB!

Not a huge problem… yet

This is a bit like looking for Smart TVs in the access logs: there may not be much there yet, but we bet it’s coming.

On Facebook, some Pingdom fans suggested that they’d start converting graphics only when 2-3% of visitors to their sites use the new iPad.

Ad arrangement Chitika has stated that the new iPad on Development 30 by now accounted for 5.52% of all iPad traffic. What Chitika forgets or ignores to mention is, what slice of the overall traffic is iPad. We noted in November last year that iPad accounted for 88% of all worldwide tablet web traffic.

Now, will you run out and get yourself a new iPad (if you haven’t by now)?

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New iPad bloat could push average web page size to 5 MB

Lately, the web has been abuzz with Instagram’s billion-dollar sale to Facebook. This is an giant amount of money for a service that is less than two years ancient. Instagold, so to speak.

This made us reckon. As you know, there have been a honest amount of high-profile deals like this ever since the initial dot-com boom back around 1998-1999. When it comes to time invested versus the sales price, how well does the Instagram acquisition stack up? It should be pretty high up there, but let’s compare it with a number of additional tech acquisitions to get some facts on the table.

Company age when bought

Initially of all, startups being scooped up quickly by huge players is nothing new. YouTube had been around less than two years when Google bought it in 2006, and Skype wasn’t much older when eBay bought it in 2005. Another instant sale was MySpace.

There have also been even quicker acquisitions than Instagram’s: Yahoo bought Flickr when the service was barely a year ancient (although Flickr reportedly got a “mere” $30 million).

Here is a chart showing the age of various tech companies and services when they were bought. Note that this is in no way a complete list.

(Some of these have been sold more than once, like Skype, but we only include the initially sale here.)

Now let’s place the acquisition price into this equation. Cost divided by time the company had been around when it was bought.

Cost per month of operation when sold

How valuable was the time invested in these companies when they were sold? How does the Instagram-Facebook deal compare to the additional deals we’ve included here? Time to find out:

Of the companies we included here, Instagram does well, but it isn’t at the top. Still, a $54+ million return per month of operation is pretty astonishing.

Worth noting is that we’re simply looking at the quickest, largest payoffs for companies here. We’re using the age of the company, which is not really the equal to the overall time invested. That would be man years if we were being really right. Something to keep in mind, considering the Instagram team is so small.

In additional words, if we had counted “value per man year invested,” Instagram may very well have topped this list.

Additional fascinating metrics

There are many ways of looking at a sale like the Instagram-Facebook deal. We want to urge an brilliant article by Andy Baio over at Wired’s Epicenter blog, which puts the Instagram acquisition in perspective with cost-per-employee and cost-per-user charts. Check it out if you haven’t by now. We really used his list of high-profile acquisitions as a data source for much of this article.

What’s pretty incredible in this area the Instagram sale, in our opinion, is that many of the additional companies on this list had hundreds of employees when they sold. Instagram had 13. As others have pointed out, that billion-dollar price point is the equivalent of $77 million per employee.

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Instagram and the fastest, largest payouts in tech startup history

Do you have a huge screen TV in your living room? Of course you do! Do you browse the web using that TV? Probably not, but you will sooner or shortly, so why not make your website TV-friendly today?

With sales figures for TVs that can connect to the Internet increasing quick, it’s time to start thinking in this area how your websites will look and work for a name sitting on a couch in front of a 60″ HDTV.

What kind of adjustments to your site’s design and functionality will you have to do? Read on to find out.

Smart TVs are here to stay

Probability are you have just got used to the thought of making smartphone and tablet friendly versions of your websites, and now you’re thinking “do I really have to care in this area TV as well?”

The answer, if you check your website logs is probably a resounding no. We doubt you see much of “SmartHub” in your logs, but we bet that you will see an increase in the coming years, so it may be time to get ahead of the pack and be ready as smart TVs are increasing in popularity and soon, there will be one in nearly every living room.

For the sake of simplicity, in this article, by a smart TV we mean a TV set that can be connected to the Internet and run various apps, and support functionality such as a web browser.

As you would expect, smart TVs are still just a small part of all TV sets sold. In 2009, nearly 1.3 billion households around the world had at least one TV set. That same year, the worldwide TV market was worth $380 billion, with North America gobbling up nearly 40%.

In evaluation, close to 20% of all TV sets sold in 2010 had some form of Internet-connection capability. This translates to expected shipments in 2011 of around 25 million smart TVs. And in just a few years, in 2013, 123 million smart TVs will be sold, according to one prediction.

Any way you look at that, those are huge numbers, and each one of those smart TVs, is another means of accessing your website.

We should of course remember that just because a smart TV can be connected to the Internet, doesn’t mean that it would be in its final setting. Some even claim that as much as 50% of all smart TVs are not connected to the Internet, even though they have the functionality to support it.

Here are our 10 tips for making your website TV-friendly:

Design for a huge screen

Contemporary TVs obviously come in all shapes and sizes, but it’s likely that you have something like a 30”, 40” or even a 60” TV set in your living room. Compare that to the show you use with your computer: if it’s any larger than 30” you’re one lucky ducky. That extra screen real estate will obviously have to be full into account when you design your site for viewing on a TV.

Design for limited pledge

But, despite a TV being pretty large compared to a computer’s show, it doesn’t necessarily have a very high pledge. Full HD is only 1920

Call it Facebook Addiction Disorder, Facebook Anxiety Disorder, Facebook depression, or Facebook unhappiness, we have all heard of issues of well-being related to public using the social arrangement too much.

And with visitors during January 2012 spending on average 405 minutes on Facebook.com, is there any wonder that a new study suggests that using Facebook spreads unhappiness and a large part of users on the site feel terrible if they can’t log in regularly?

So with Facebook predicted to reach 1 billion users this year, are we putting too much of our lives in Zuckerberg’s creation?

Facebook spreads unhappiness and anxiety, study claims

“Facebook spreads unhappiness,” was a headline in one of the leading daily Swedish newspapers a couple of days ago. Another article exclaimed: “One million Swedes suffer Facebook ‘angst’.” These are articles published as a results of a study, which started as an event on Facebook in June 2011 entitled “The largest Facebook study in Sweden.”

We have summarized some of the key findings from this study:

As you can see this makes for fantastic reading if you’re Facebook, but perhaps not so fantastic reading for society as a whole. Clearly, Facebook is an incredibly sticky site, with lots of users depending on it, indeed craving it, on a daily basis.

But that’s not all

Where this gets even more fascinating though is when we combine it with results from additional studies. Then the picture gets a bit more worrisome if you’re Mark Zuckerberg.

Basically, what the Swedish study found – as questionable as the statistical significance of the results may be – is in line with findings from additional studies, linking public feeling terrible in different ways to using Facebook a lot.

A study published earlier this month suggests that “public who are more involved with the (sic!) Facebook are more likely to believe that others are more pleased and having a better life.”

The study stops small of drawing any conclusions in this area whether Facebook usage can lead to depression, but it does say that it’s simple to reckon that everyone else’s life is all sunshine, when in fact it’s probably not.

That skewed picture of reality is armored on social media networks such as Facebook, as clarified by a similar study published in 2011.

It comes to a similar conclusion, but added an explicit mention of social networking sites, such as Facebook. In that study we can read that sites like Facebook: “may exacerbate common misperceptions of others’ emotional lives because of the complete control that users have over the public image they project to the world through their photo albums, status updates, friendship networks, and so forth.”

So, basically, on Facebook users lie in this area their lives, or, at least, don’t tell the whole truth. And based on that distorted presentation, everyone else feels terrible, because they can’t keep up with the pleased life (they reckon) everyone else is living.

Remains to be seen if it’s a real problem

It’s simple to jump to conclusions when you read in this area study results like this, but there may be reason here to talk in this area an emerging pattern.

Do you reckon Facebook is becoming too huge and powerful, not just in the sense of having a lot of in rank in this area you in its data centers, but in the sense of having a grip over your life?

Is checking your Facebook account the initially thing you do in the morning? Make your confession in the comments.

Picture (top) via Shutterstock.

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Do you feel terrible when you don’t log in to Facebook regularly?

For blogs and many additional types of sites, getting an interaction going with readers is essential. But it would seem that many believe that installing a third-party comment system on a website, something like Disqus, IntenseDebate, or LiveFyre, drags down the site’s speed greatly.

Instead of spurring on debate, conversation, and interaction, a slower site could discourage users to take part, and users could instead end up leaving the site. But is it really the case that adding these comment systems slow down sites?

We place five comment systems to the test and found out that there’s less difference in speed than you might reckon.

Comments are vital

Initially, let’s set up that comments are vital for many websites, not just blogs. We reckon comments are a critical component of our blogs at Pingdom, and we have posted before asking for feedback on which third-party comment system we should go with, if any.  As you can see, we still use WordPress’ built-in comment system, but we are right now looking at alternatives.

For example, in December we noted that Disqus has a commanding lead in the Technorati Top 100 blogs, where it had a 22% market share. In the comments to that article we got many excellent opinions and suggestions as to what we should do.

But if installing a third-party comment system will slow a site down, then it’s something that many webmasters will not want to do. Since users like speedy sites – customers are often won or lost in mere seconds – webmasters obviously take this very seriously.

Number of files loaded (requests)

So we place five of the more common comment systems to the test:

1. WordPress’ built-in comment system
2. Disqus
3. Facebook
4. IntenseDebate
5. LiveFyre.

You can read more in this area how we did the testing at the end of the article.

Initially, we looked at how many requests were made when using the different comment systems. With our testing site, we saw 6 files being loaded in with just plain WordPress, without any third-party comment system. Disqus and LiveFyre each loaded 9 files, IntenseDebate 11 files, and Facebook 14 files.

Page size

You would perhaps expect that this difference in number of files that are being downloaded mean a huge difference in the total size being requested when the site is loaded. Though, there is not much difference between plain WordPress and three of the third-party systems: Disqus, IntenseDebate, and LiveFyre. For example, the difference between WordPress and Disqus, was only in this area 4 kB.

The only comment system that really stuck out in terms of page size was Facebook, which required nearly 47 kb extra to be loaded compared to plain WordPress. Although this, in and of itself, may not seem like much, it’s very likely a website will also have additional plugins and additions installed, each requiring something additional to be loaded, so the page size can then quickly increase.

Website performance

But of course page size and number of files don’t necessarily accurately reflect how quick or slow a website is as perceived by a user. Here’s how the sites fared when we looked at the time it took to load them:

What this showed us is that again there is not that much difference between the five different comment systems, with a few exceptions. WordPress is, in each instance, the fastest one to load, but it’s only when testing from Amsterdam it crushes the others.

When we then finally collective the results from each location, and looked at an average loading speed for each of the comment systems, this is what we got:

Again, as you can clearly see, there was not that much of a difference between using WordPress’ built-in comment system and any of the additional four, third-party systems. We would even go so far as to guess that there was less of a difference than you would have thought before reading this.

Not a huge drag on site performance

The conclusion must be that there is not such a huge difference in website performance between running just plain WordPress and having one of these third-party comment systems installed. That is, with the possible exception of Facebook.

Of course this is just a very limited test, which doesn’t necessarily reflect real-life cases, where multiple users access a site running multiple plugins, and additional modifications. Where servers are located also play a role, as does where content is located (on a CDN, for example).

That said, we reckon it indicates that installing a third-party comment system does not necessarily drag down a site’s performance. At least there is not a huge difference in performance in our tests.

Could there be additional things adding to the issue of users perceiving sites with these add-ons installed as slow? Let us know what you reckon.

Take our poll

We produced a simple, one-question poll, trying to gauge what our readers would prefer to see implemented here on the Royal Pingdom site.

Click here to take the poll!

How we tested: We tested on a WordPress site, which was hosted in Sweden. It had the latest WordPress, 3.3.1, and all plugins were up to date. Though, we disabled all plugins additional than the ones needed for each comment system to work. We also used the defaulting WordPress theme with no modifications, just so we could get a test that was as honest as possible. For each comment system we used the corresponding official WordPress plugin, with the exception of Facebook, for which we used the Simple Facebook Comments plugin. We tested ten times for each comment plugin from all three testing sites that our Tools uses (tools.pingdom.com/fpt): Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Dallas, Texas, USA, and New York City, New York, USA. From the ten tests we then took the average for requests, page size, and performance.

Speech bubble image via Shutterstock.

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Testing the speed of comment systems for blogs