Pingdom

Website monitoring service Pingdom has completed a bit of analysis about Google and their products. They found that 45% of their products are in beta currently. Some of the more popular Google products in beta include: Gmail, Google Docs, the new Chrome browser and Google Video. Playground products weren't included in the 45%.

Interesting to note that Google App Engine is a "preview release" as opposed to a beta. Why is Google keeping their products in beta? Pingdom notes that companies normally don't charge for beta services while Google does charge for some of their beta products. I'd disagree, there are plenty of services that charge while in beta. It can help to validate a product.

The beta tag is like a shield to protect against bugs and downtime. If a service in beta is down, it's easy to say "hey it's in beta, give them a break!"

If Flickr could move out of beta, certainly Google could do it too.

Web site monitoring service Pingdom is out with another report today, this time focusing on Google Analytics usage within the Alexa top 500 sites. Pingdom verified each site and found that 32.3% of the top 500 use Google Analytics to monitor their sites. The 33% number is a bit high in my opinion. Most large sites use "industrial" analytics applications like Omniture or Webtrends.

Pingdom suggests that most use Google Analytics because it's free. What we still do not know is how the data is used on the backend - even if Google suggests it's not being used, it's still being dumped into the huge database that Google maintains on each one of us.

My guess is that if Pingdom runs the same test on the top 2,000-10,000, the Google Analytics count will be much higher - probably in the 60% range. This is currently their sweet spot - outside the Fortune 500 and down to the brand new blog with one reader.

I still believe a combination of internal trackers and external trackers (both for the local site and for the competition) is the optimum combination for success.

If you are interested in not being tracked by Google as you browse site-to-site, check out James Thomas' article about how he lives without Google.

The fine folks at Web monitoring service Pingdom are out with their latest list. This time it's Goole AdWords ads that have gone contextually wrong. From a new brain on eBay to visiting Hell with Kayak, these ads are a hoot.

Here are a couple of my favorites from the list:

Here we find that selling on eBay is like selling your soul - with all of the fees they charge and the PayPal fees, I guess it makes sense.

We already know that the Germans make the best knives (see latenight tv), now we know they make the best AdWords ads. I just love these ascii ads -- too bad Google has banned them. I've watched that second car for hours and it never gets any closer to the car in front of it.

Website monitoring company Pingdom is out with their downtime study for the top social networks for the first four months of 2008. Guess who leads with the most downtime? If you guessed Twitter, you win the prize! Pingdom reports that Twitter has been down over 37 hours in the past four months. Coming up right behind Twitter is the service that wants to go to Prom but has no date, Pownce. Pownce claims an exciting 13+ hours of downtime.

Big player networks MySpace and Facebook came in with 1 and 2 hours of downtime respectively. Now this makes sense, Twitter and Pownce are new and while it seems to the 250 that Twitter has been around forever, they haven't. Part of their downtime is caused by maintenance and upgrades. Larger networks such as MySpace and Facebook have huge valuations which allow them to have the server capacity and production environments that don't require downtime for changes.

Pingdom, the Web site monitoring tool (we use it on CN), has published a list of some of the weird domain names Google owns. As someone who used to manage a very large domain list, most of these are smart moves. Things like "googlesucks" and "gmailblows" are good to purchase to make sure they don't end up in the wrong hands.

Some others on the list include:

• googlepoo.com
• googlewebmonitoring.com
• googlewarez.com -- aah the early 90s
• googlesex.com - call girl search engine
• googlenewyork.com - oh yea!
• googledaycare.com - get them while they are young
• goooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooogle.com - yep, can you even count them without getting dizzy?
• thesecretofburritos.com - uhm, perhaps Google is getting into the content business?

Check out the full list on the Pingdom blog.

As a side note, if you are working on a startup, the Pingdom blog is a great learning tool about how to effectively use a blog to generate buzz and traffic. When people click the Pingdom link above to read more, they might venture out to the main Pingdom service. In any event, having a blog that pushes more than the normal product updates is critical to organic buzz generation.

Pingdom is out with their latest stats regarding downtime for the major social networks for the first 60-ish days in 2008. Bebo leads the list with over 12 hours of downtime after their big downtime in January. We wondered if that downtime was due to the rapid expansion of the Bebo developer platform.

Other notables on the list include Friendster with 6 hours of downtime, LinkedIn at 4 hours, Facebook at 95 minutes and LiveJournal at 10 minutes.

As a side note, these type of blog posts from Pingdom are what I try to explain to new startups all the time. Use your tools to show off your tools. This is something I rarely see and, where applicable, should be on every marketing plan.

Web monitoring service Pingdom has some interesting research today on the downtime at social networking service Bebo. While not big in the U.S., Bebo is the 2nd largest social network in the UK and Wikipedia notes that it's the third largest in the U.S.

In December 2007, Bebo had 30 minutes of downtime. This increased to 320 minutes in January and with only 14 days into February, downtime is at 194 minutes. The interesting thing to note is that in mid-December, Bebo launched their open developer platform. Could the platform be the cause of the additional downtime? Was Bebo not prepared to handle the massive amounts of new traffic and API hits?

Pingdom has released their latest downtime study - this time for the top social networks. Windows Live Spaces came in with the highest downtime - 3 hours in the last month. Pingdom notes, "In the Windows Live Spaces example, three hours may not sound like all that much over a month, but it is three hours of lost page views and ad exposure that Microsoft will never get back."

Other names in the list: MySpace and Facebook clocked in 10 minutes of downtime this month, Bebo at 30 minutes and Xanga at 2 hours. Yahoo 360 was the big winner with zero downtime in the month.

Don't forget to check out Pingdom's special offer for CN readers. Here is the chart from Pingdom:

Earlier today we posted an interview with Pingdom CEO Sam Nurmi. And now I have a very special offer for all of the CenterNetworks readers. Pingdom has been kind enough to share the following offer:

Using the discount code "centernetworks" (without the quotes) when signing up will give you a 50% discount AND 100 extra SMS for alerts.

To use the code, go to www.pingdom.com/signup, select one of the package types (not trial), and enter the code into the "promotional code" box and press "Apply code". This also works when upgrading from within a trial account.

Note that those 100 extra SMS are on top of the ones that come with theaccount. The promo code is active from today until the end ofthe year.

(CN does not make anything from this promotion, we are just trying to help out the CN community with a service we find valuable)

We have covered Pingdom several times on CenterNetworks. It's a service I use on all of my sites to monitor uptime. I like the alerts via email and mobile when one of my sites is down. One key I have learned is to use a separate email that is not on the domain you are monitoring. Otherwise you might not get the email alerts when it's down. I like what Pingdom is doing with their blog - they provide lots of stats on the big sites and the industry as a whole. To find out more about Pingdom, I spoke with CEO Sam Nurmi and our discussion is below. Pingdom has been kind enough to provide us with a discount code for CN readers, will be posted this evening.

Allen: Can you provide a brief bio about yourself?

Sam: I'm a Swedish, dyslectic 30-year-old of Finnish descent. I've loved all kinds of problem-solving ever since I was a kid, and I've always been very interested in what makes businesses tick and how to expand on those ideas. I feel that I was destined to become an entrepreneur from an early age.

I'm currently running my fourth business, Pingdom, which is an uptime monitoring service. Previous companies include Loopia, which I founded and grew to the largest web hosting company in Sweden before I sold it in mid 2005. At that time, Loopia had 30% of the Swedish domain and hosting market. I also founded Troxo, a software development company that focuses on web-related software.

These days my focus is 100% on Pingdom, which we intend to grow into a market leader.

Allen: What's Pingdom?

Sam: Pingdom is a service that monitors the uptime and response time of websites , servers or any other device that is and should be accessible over the internet.