Web Demands Could Cause Gridlock by 2011

Total posts up from 1B a year ago, 5B just 4 months ago

(NEWSER) - Twitter isn’t growing as explosively as it used to, but the volume of traffic on the microblogging site is still expanding fast enough that it should hit 10 billion total tweets in the coming days. That’s up from a billion about a year ago, and 5 billion just 4 months ago. Gauging the progress is quite simple, Mashable reports; just look at the number tag at the end of a tweet’s URL. A recent one read 9917803012, and the site produces about 50 million a day. More»

Social network crowds out Google and Yahoo for first time

(NEWSER) - Facebook got a big present this holiday season: It was the No. 1 US website on Christmas and on Christmas Eve. Facebook, which lagged behind Google in second place last year, trounced that site and rival Yahoo—though the search engines generated more traffic throughout the balance of the year. And social networking pulled off a Christmas miracle, ReadWriteWeb notes, despite the recent controversy over new privacy settings. More»

(NEWSER) - The US military is considering restrictions on access to social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, citing privacy and security concerns, the Military Times reports. “Sometimes people, because of the nature of these sites, can have a tendency to get lax in what they put on there,” a Pentagon spokesman says. On the table are everything from shuttering access on government computers to setting up a separate “private” net. More»

Growth outside US could put networking site at 200M by spring

(NEWSER) - John McCain and the iPhone may be so 2008, but Facebook is going strong. The networking site now claims 150 million users, just four months after surpassing 100 million. At this rate, CEO Mark Zuckerberg will have a delightful 25th-birthday gift this spring: 200 million users. Most new members live outside the US, and popularity hasn’t translated into big revenue yet, CNET reports. More»

ExtremeTech calls the estimate 'conservative'

(NEWSER) - Think pornography is popular online? One tech site estimates that 30% of all Internet traffic involves porn, with the world's biggest porno site trumping traffic on CNN or ESPN three times over, the New York Daily News reports. That site, Xvideos, draws 4.4 billion page views monthly—which means enormous traffic when you consider that viewers on porn sites stay an average of 15 to 20 minutes. And that porn sites offer video requiring massive bandwidth. More»