The Internet - Over 1 Billion Served

(image found on blog.searchenginewatch.com)
Well look out McDonald's, it looks like there is someone else working on the billion served motto. Its official folks there are now over 1 Billion users of the Internet according to comScore Inc. These numbers were reaches in December 2008.

"The Asia-Pacific region now accounts for 41 percent of all Internet users, with China ranked as the largest Internet population in the world, says ComScore. China now has 180 million Internet users, or about 18 percent of the worldwide cyberspace audience. The United States ranks second at 16.2 percent, followed by Japan, Germany and the United Kingdom.

“Surpassing 1 billion global users is a significant landmark in the history of the Internet,” says ComScore CEO Magid Abraham. “The second billion will be online before we know it, and the third billion will arrive even faster than that.”

(image found on blog.searchenginewatch.com)
Top sites include:
Google with 776 million visitors
Microsoft with 647 million visitors
Yahoo with 562 million visitors
Facebook with 222 million visitors (in January there were twice as many recorded for Facebook usage, I have a feeling that the recent election of the new President had something to deal with those numbers)
MySpace with 125 million visitors

Please note these number are issued in the following ways:
"ComScore (Nasdaq: SCOR) said its numbers include Internet users ages 15 or older, from home or work computers. They do not include traffic from public computers, like Internet cafes, or access from mobile phones or PDAs."

So in reality it is alot more but these would be conservative estimates for usages. It would be interesting if someone was out there actually including all of the other online usage resources from PDA's to now Cars.

Global Internet Audiences Exceeds 1 Billion in December 2008 (blog.searchenginewatch.com)

Internet audience tops 1 billion (Nashville Business Journal)

Internet hits major milestone, surpassing 1 billion monthly users (ComputerWorld)

Internet Users Top 1 Billion, Most of Them Asian (PCmag.com)

Obama Rocks the Web Big-Time today

(photo from CNN snipped grabbed on AD Week website article)

President Obama has shown the world that he is the man. Earlier today at the office i noticed that the web was crawling away in speed. I've never seen it this slow. But, then it hit me. BAM all the video feeds were eating up bandwidth on the web like a crazy fireside sale where everything must go.

After doing a little bit of pocking around the web this is what I've found out so far about the web feeds being shown today:
CNN - reporting more than 18.8 million live feeds

MSN - reporting over 9 million live feeds and over 80 million page views

Facebook - reporting over 600,000 updates at a rate of 4,000 / min

This is a new high usage mark in video feeds.

I have been keeping up with the events all day via AP video feed which has worked best for me. They have had a great live video feed all day from a link off the Chicago Tribune website. Many various cell phone users were also affected by the usage from either not getting service or in and out coverage in their area. With the excitement and information in the air today's technology got a good workout from the web to mobile phones they were in full use and delivered on demand.

So i end this post with my hat off to all the people in the technology sector that kept us up to date on events today and made our day a bit more complete with knowing what was going on as it was happening. Thank You for a great job well done.

Obama's Inauguration Rocks the Web (Ad Week)
Inauguration pass or fail? Social network, streaming video report card (zd.net)
Inauguration Taxes Mobile Phone Networks (PC World)