STAT ComScore: Internet Population Passes One Billion; Top 15 Countries

Ed: Web is still hyper-growth business. Mobile and netbooks add to easy access.

by Erick Schonfeld

The number of people on the Internet surpassed one billion in December, according to comScore. The actual number is probably higher than that (Internet World Stats counted nearly 1.5 billion Web surfers worldwide as of June 30, 2008). In any case, only between 15 and 22 percent of the world’s population is on the Internet. We have a long way to go.

Using the comScore numbers, here is the breakdown by country and region (in unique visitors as of December, 2008; some of the numbers are rounded):

Top 15 countries, by Internet population:

1. China: 179.7 million
2. United States: 163.3 million
3. Japan: 60.0 million
4. Germany: 37.0 million
5. United Kingdom: 36.7 million
6. France: 34.0 million
7. India: 32.1 million
8. Russia: 29.0 million
9. Brazil: 27.7 million
10. South Korea: 27.3 million
11. Canada: 21.8 million
12. Italy: 20.8 million
13. Spain: 17.9 million
14. Mexico: 12.5 million
15. Netherlands: 11.8 million

Worldwide Internet Audience

• Asia Pacific: 416 million (41.3%)
• Europe: 283 million (28.0%)
• North America: 185 million (18.4%)
• Latin America: 75 million (7.4%)
• Middle East & Africa: 49 million (4.8%)

CLIP ThisMoment: Photo and Video Micro-Blogging for the Mainstream

by Frederic Lardinois

If you imagine a mash-up of a micro-blogging site with a very pretty photo and video sharing service, with good privacy controls and an innovative user interface thrown in for good measure, you might come up with something akin to thisMoment. ThisMoment, which is still in private beta (though we have a few invites to give away), is one of the prettier sites we have reviewed in the recent past. The idea behind thisMoment is that you can upload photos and videos from special moments in your life to the site, which then displays them in a beautiful user interface. The site, however, is flexible enough to make it a very capable all-purpose photo and video micro-blogging service.

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'Moments,' as thisMoment calls your updates, appear in a side-scrolling slideshow at the bottom of the screen. They can include multiple photos and videos, which you can import from Flickr, Photobucket, Picasa, and YouTube. You can also upload pictures and videos directly to thisMoment.

The central element for browsing thisMoment is the timeline, which consists of a series of bars. You can assign different 'moments' a specific importance, which is represented by the height of the bar in your timeline. Different types of events also come with different colors. This is a surprisingly elegant way of browsing through individual timelines, but it also makes finding specific events relatively hard, has the timelines don't actually have dates on them.

As you would expect from a social site, you can follow other users, send messages to your friends and family members on the service,

Geared Towards the Mainstream

ThisMoment is clearly geared towards a mainstream audience. It does have the ability to send updates to your Twitter account, but there are no embeddable widgets or other export functions for your photos or videos. For the most parts, thisMoment is a closed off silo. There is also no way to send images or videos to it from outside of the service. You can't email a picture to thisMoment, for example, and have it appear in your timeline.

Verdict: Pretty, Fun, But Limited

Most users won't mind (and may even appreciate) that the service lives in a walled garden. The site is definitely a great place to share updates about your kids or your travels, and thisMoment's user interface is very elegant, though sometimes to the detriment of its functionality. Why, for example, is the actual content relegated to the bottom half of the screen, even when browsing through the photos and videos of an event?

Advanced users will probably want more functionality and the ability to port their data or at least get an RSS feed from thisMoment that they can import to FriendFeed or other services.

However, advanced users are not the focus of this site, and it does what it does very well.

CLIP Google Puts The Squeeze On Free Apps

Ed: Not impressed. We have 6 clients using Google Apps for domain name only, not mail, docs, calendar, and web hosting. How many do you have?

Google says the vast majority of the 1 million businesses that use Google Apps opt for the free advertising supported version. To make the free option less attractive they’ve been quietly lowering the number of user accounts that can be associated with a free account. Now as businesses grow, they’ll be forced to move to the paid version much more quickly than before.

Google Apps is a suite of online applications like gmail, Google calendar, Google Docs, etc. that are packaged and tailored for business use. It’s growing fast - in a recent post where Google announced the opening of a reseller program, the company said that more than 1 million businesses and 10 million users use Google Apps today, and 3,000 new businesses sign up daily. The largest business user, Genentech, has 20,000 employees on Google Apps.

When Google Apps first launched in August 2006 it was free and described as “a service available at no cost to organizations of all shapes and sizes.”

Free for everyone lasted until February 2007, when Google announced a premier edition of the service with more storage and an uptime guarantee. The cost was (and is) $50 per user per year.

When Google Apps first launched up to 200 user accounts could be created for each business under the free version. But that limit was quietly reduced to just 100 user accounts. And then when the reseller program was announced earlier this month, the limit was cut in half again, to just 50 accounts.