Where were you on the Internet in 2010? What about in 2011? The folks over at Royal Pingdom have compiled a nice set of data for the Internet, by the Internet. That is, an entire list of data about email, websites, web servers, domain names by their .dot web addresses, Internet users by country, types of social media, web browser usage, mobile users, videos and images. We decided to take a look at the data points that tell us the most about the read/write web: websites and domain names, Facebook, Twitter and Internet users by continent. More importantly, we’ll look at how the Internet of 2011 compares to the Internet of 2010.

Facebook & Twitter: 2010 vs. 2011

Facebook: By the end of 2010, there were 600 million people total on Facebook, and 250 million were new users. Seventy percent of Facebook’s user base was located outside the United States. Users installed 20 million Facebook apps each day. Fast-forward one year later: 800+ million users on Facebook, including 200 million new users. By October 2011, Facebook was as big as the Internet of 2004. In 2011, Facebook mobile hit smartphones and Androids everywhere. Three-hundred fifty million Facebook users logged on from their mobile phones. They also shared 30 billion pieces of content (links, notes, photos) on Facebook every month. By the end of 2012, we’re likely to see an additional category: Facebook users who log on from their tablets, especially the iPad.

Twitter Loves @ladygaga: By the end of 2010, Twitter counted 25 billion sent tweets, 100 million new accounts and 175 million total users. Lady Gaga (@ladygaga) was Twitter’s most followed user, with a whopping 7.7 million followers. By the end of 2011, that number had more than doubled to 18.1 million followers – @ladygaga is still the world’s most followed Twitter user. Twitter grew to 225 million accounts, but only 100 million of those were active.

Tumblr and WordPress blogs grew fast in 2011. As of September 2011, Tumblr received 8X more pageviews than WordPress. By the end of the year, Tumblr blogs numbered 39 million and WordPress blogs hit 70 million.

Where Are The Internet Users? Asia

In 2010, Asia outnumbered all other continents with 42% of Internet users; in 2011, Asia made up 44% of the Internet’s population. European Internet users declined from 24.2% in 2010 to 23% by the end of 2011. North America saw a slight drop off, too, from 13.5% to 13%. Africa grew from only 5.6% of the Internet population to 6%. Latin America/Caribbean, Middle East and Oceania/Australia stayed about the same from 2010-2011.

Websites & Domain Names in 2010 vs. 2011

As of December 2010, the Internet held 255 million websites. That number more than doubled by the end of December 2011 to 555 million. Of domain name types, .COM grew the most from 88.8 million at the end of 2010 to 95.5 million by the end of 2011. The .NET domain names only grew by 0.6 million, whereas .ORG added 1.3 million domain names. The year 2011 also brought along 7.6 million .info domain names and 2.1 million .biz domains.

What will the Internet of 2012 look like? Post your predictions in the comments.

As you get older, you start to see the great cycles of life emerge. Hope and disillusionment and hope again; pride crushed by defeat and then rising again; and of course, the rising wave of speculation in advance of every Apple product launch.

No surprise, then, that Morgan Stanley analysts are getting plenty of news coverage this week for predictions of a March iPad 3 release and a June iPhone 5. They join plenty of other pundits, and the predictions are more or less coalescing around quad-core chips, a higher resolution screen for the iPad and a slimmer profile for the iPhone.

Here is the part where I’m supposed to write that people who obsess over those product rumors (unless they’re investing in Apple or it’s competitors) are shallow fools destined to spend the next Apple keynote gnashing their teeth in fury that the latest new iDevice doesn’t come with the tachyon emitters that MacRumourLicious.com swore were coming.

Except that I get it. I understand the appeal. For a lot of us, speculating about the next iPhone’s processor or whether the iPad’s touch-screen will be pressure-sensitive (yes, fine, I’m the only one speculating about that) or what the next version of Android will offer is about more than just speed ratings or raw performance. It’s about what we can do with the new features or increased power of the device: what we’ll be able to create, how we’ll be able to collaborate, and how we can foster richer and more satisfying connections with each other.

OK, it’s also about whether the next version of Angry Birds will be able to have 3D-rendered shadows and photo-realistic explosions. But it’s also about that humanity-lofty stuff, too.

Credits: ReadWriteWeb

Ever wondered which musician has the fastest growing Facebook Page? Or what TV series? A new beta service called SocialMedia-live is tracking the growth rate of 38 million Facebook Pages, with 2 million of those available to view. It has statistics on total number of likes, fan growth, interesting newcomers and male/female breakdown. These statistics are categorized and users can create comparison graphs. The bad news is that there is no apparent search function.

The answer to the first question, by the way, is Adele, who gained 175,000 followers over the last 24 hours (at time of writing). Adele’s popularity on Facebook is mainly due to her female fans; 62% are female and 38% male. The fastest growing TV show is Mob Wives, perhaps thanks to the current “swear jar sweepstakes” promotion on its Facebook Page. This type of data is useful, albeit somewhat limited at this point.

A sister site called Likes Matter offers a real-time view of Facebook Page growth rates. There I discovered that Eminem’s Facebook Page is currently attracting about 35-40 new likes every minute.

The main site, the awkwardly named SocialMedia-live, updates Facebook Page data on 90,000 “big players” every 10 minutes – including Eminem, Coca Cola, YouTube and other very popular brands. A further 1.8 million “medium-sized pages” are updated every 12 hours. The other 36 million or so “little pages” are refreshed every 5 days.

There’s a special page for “Hip Fanpages,” those Facebook Pages “that have distinguished themselves in terms of layout, navigational ease, interactive fanpage features, etc.” Current members include Adidas Originals, Snooki, Livestrong, Star Wars and a German comedian named Linda P. That last pick is a clue that SocialMedia-live hails from Germany.

There are some useful comparison tools, too. Below is a chart comparing the growth of Adele, Jennifer Lopez and Katy Perry over the past 90 days. We can see that the popularity of Adele’s Facebook Page spiked in January of this year. She has about 12.6 million fans at time of writing. Meanwhile Lopez is growing faster than Perry. Although note that Perry has more fans than Adele and Lopez combined. She has 37.6 million fans, while Lopez has 8 million. A likely explanation is that Perry is much nearer to peak popularity on Facebook than either Adele or Lopez. Growth rate could also be affected by when the fan pages were started. So, as always, take these statistics with a grain of the proverbial salt.

The big thing missing from SocialMedia-live is search. I could find no way to get statistics about our own ReadWriteWeb Facebook Page, for example. There also seems to be no easy access to the 36 million or so “little pages.” Both of those issues severely limits the usefulness of the site for marketers, who would be a prime audience for this data.

But this is a beta site, so we hope it will expand over time. For now, if you’re interested in finding out how fast certain brands are growing their Facebook Page fan bases, then SocialMedia-live offers an interesting set of statistics.

Credits: ReadWriteWeb

Workers at Foxconn threaten to commit suicide in protest of poor working conditions. This and more in today’s Daily Wrap.

Sometimes it’s difficult to catch every story that hits tech media in a day, so we wrap up some of the most talked about stories. We give you a daily recap of what you missed in the ReadWriteWeb Community, including a link to some of the most popular discussions in our offsite communities on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ as well.

Foxconn Workers Threaten Mass Suicide

Over 300 employees at the Foxconn factory in China climbed atop the building and threatened to commit suicide en masse. The Taiwan-based Foxconn, most known for manufacturing the XBox360, the iPhone and iPad, the Playstation 3, the Wii and the Kindle, has long been under fire for difficult working conditions and the irony that the workers who earn so little are making the most popular recreational luxury items on the planet.

From the comments:

KathrynTerry — “Making toys for by comparison, rich capitalists,while being an underfeed,overworked human beings.

Free labor is just wrong especially when making non-essential toys, that carry hefty price tags. Shame on Xbox,Kindle,I Phone. Profits must be outlandish. Why not have decent working conditions for all??? People take their own lives in despair.”

More Must Read Stories:

The Nokia Lumia 900 Gives Windows Phones A Chance In the United States

A year ago Nokia was talking about hurling itself off a burning platform into a cold and dark ocean. The world wondered if the largest cellphone maker on Earth was committing suicide by phasing out Symbian smartphones and ditching the MeeGo operating system. Nokia, the company that brought many consumers their first cellphones, was crumbling in front of our very eyes. (more)

Will Data Collection on User Behavior Be Forced to End Soon?

Harvard Business Review ran three interesting short pieces in this month’s magazine, under the misleadingly timeless title “Tackling Business Problems.” The three essays are actually guest submissions from business radicals, the final of the three being from social media luminary Doc Searls. (more)

With Kinect For Windows, Microsoft Ushers in the Era of Motion-Controlled Personal Computing

We all knew it was coming the minute we laid eyes on the Kinect. The wireless, motion-based controller for the XBox 360 was designed for gaming but its potential uses for other human-machine interactions were immediately obvious. We saw it in the way the device let users flow through film selections in the Netflix UI using only their hands. The Kinect’s potential also wasn’t lost on hackers and tinkerers, who wasted no time making the device do all kinds of things outside of the scope of the XBox. (more)

Visa Certifies 6 Smartphones for Its NFC Mobile Payments App

Visa is beginning to make its move in the mobile payments space. While MasterCard has heavily featured its near field communications capabilities and exclusive partnership with the Google Wallet, Visa has been working behind the scenes to set up mobile payments strategy. Visa announced today that its payWave NFC mobile wallet application has been certified for a variety of smartphones giving the payments giant its first real steps into unleashing NFC wallets. (more)

Google Web Fonts Get Smaller and Faster

Speed counts, and nobody knows that better than Google. The latest tweak to provide better performance comes in the form of adopting a new compression type that promises to yield files about 15% smaller than using Gzip to compress fonts. If you’re already using Google’s Web Fonts, what do you need to do to get the improvements? Nothing! (more)

CES 2012: Now You Can Check Facebook From Your Benz

In an age of smartphone addiction, you’ll find a Facebook user checking and updating from pretty much anywhere. But what about from the car itself?

Six months ago, the Mercedes-Benz engineering team began developing a Facebook app. The new product offers a way for drivers to access Facebook friends who are close, or nearby restaurants that their friends have “liked” on Facebook. (more)

CES 2012: Find All The Gadgets With Google Maps for Android

If you’re attending the Consumer Electronic Show (CES) this week and have an Android phone, you’ll be able to use Google Maps to navigate inside the Las Vegas Convention Center. Select resorts and casinos on the Las Vegas strip are also covered, as is McCarran International Airport. (more)

Firefox to IT Managers: We Know We’re Annoying, But Here Comes a Solution

As beloved as Firefox is by its users, the open source browser has had a harder time finding hardcore fans among IT managers at large companies and other organizations. That’s because its rapid release cycle has always been notoriously tricky for them to keep up with. On top of that, Mozilla would sometimes end support on a particular older version of its browser before enterprise clients were ready. (more)

CES 2012: Mystery of the Missing Office 15

The last Steve Ballmer keynote has come and gone, and even after the company’s overt effort to reduce expectations about product announcements, if you listen carefully, you may still be able to hear the faint sound of a gospel choir chanting about one of the few remaining expectations that was left unmet last night: There was no word on a possible Metro-style preview of Office 15.(more)

Credits: ReadWriteWeb

Lots of fun stuff coming down the pike from the jQuery Mobile folks. According to a post today by Todd Parker, the 1.0.1 maintenance release for jQuery Mobile will be coming out in “the next two weeks.” After that, Parker provides a look at some of the new features that we’ll see in 1.1 and 1.2.

Parker says that the jQuery Mobile project is moving to regular releases every three months (or so). The first of the timed releases is 1.1, which is expected in February.

What’s in 1.1

On the presentation side, 1.1 will add support for “true” fixed toolbars and smoother AJAX page transitions. According to Parker, the old method of using fixed toolbars did not work as well as hoped. With the 1.1 release, users will have true fixed toolbars if they’re using Android 2.2 or higher, iOS5, BlackBerry 7, the Kindle Fire and others. You can read all about the problems with fixed mobile positioning on Brad Frost’s blog.

As a result of the fixed toolbar support that’s going into 1.1, the touchOverflow feature is going to be deprecated in 1.1 and removed in 1.2. Says Parker, “Now with the significant changes to fixed headers and transition planned for 1.1, these will improve the experience in an almost identical way as touchOverflow, except it will work on a lot more platforms and with less complexity so we’ve decided to retire this feature.”

Parker says that the jQuery Mobile team tried to make transitions smooth in 1.0 “but there were two significant constraints that we couldn’t avoid: the need to scroll the viewport between transitions and Android’s poor animation performance.” With 1.1, Parker says that they’ve fixed the problems with a lot of work. On most mobile browsers. Older Android devices are going to be excluded from complex transitions and see the fade transition instead.

Figure: jQuery Mobile Flip Demo

If you want, you can check out a demo of the page transitions that’s in progress. I tried it out on iOS5 and it worked quite well.

Less visible to users, but more fun for developers, jQuery Mobile 1.1 will also add support for JavaScript’s Asynchronous Module Definition (AMD). Parker credits James Burke for “jumping in and helping us polish our AMD implementation.”

Springtime for jQuery Mobile

In the spring, look for the jQuery Mobile 1.2 release. It’s too early to say exactly what will be in that release, but Parker says that one likely feature is the popup component. This would give users popup menus, photos, dialogs, etc. on mobile browsers – while developers only need to add a few lines of HTML and a link.

As Parker points out, the feature is a bit buggy right now if you check out the demo. I tried it on iOS5 and most of the demo buttons popped up and disappeared before a user would have any time to react. The menu is relatively stable, but the tooltip, form, dialog and other demos are still pretty rough.

Now that jQuery Mobile has passed the 1.0 milestone, things seem to be humming along nicely. What else do you think that jQuery Mobile needs? If you’re interested in trying it or pitching in, jQuery Mobile is on GitHub and released under the MIT and GPLv2 licenses.

Credits: ReadWriteWeb

There’s a special appeal that Myers-Briggs personality types holds for folks in the online space. Maybe it’s because of the appeal of a simple yet exhaustive taxonomy that can capture the whole spectrum of human variation. Maybe it’s because you can quantify it, plot it on a graph and measure it against other people’s – kind of like Klout for your soul.

Or maybe because people can drop it into a Twitter bio, and reveal their inner selves in just four characters, which helpfully leaves room for the words “passionate about B2B marketing for rotor arm assemblies” along with that that quote that Gandhi apparently never said.

Whatever the reason, it at least suggests that in a world so often dominated by metrics and conversions, we’re still up for a little introspection. Especially if it leads to an embeddable web badge. I take comfort from that.

Happy new year, all.

Credits: ReadWriteWeb