iPhone dominates mobile web

ArsTechnica published an article on the latest NetStatistics report, which shows that nearly 67% of the mobile web is iPhone generated:

The iPhone's Mobile Safari continued to kick butt and take names in February, though its numbers dropped from January in the face of strong competitors, according to research firm Net Applications. While this firm's data—culled from traffic observed across its "exclusive on-demand network of live stats customers"—differs somewhat from another study we saw in January, the conclusion is still the same: the iPhone still dominates the mobile Web.

According to Net Applications' most recent survey of the mobile browser market, the iPhone OS commands nearly 67 of mobile browsing worldwide. Its closest competitors have yet to break double digits, with Java ME (which collectively represents the stripped-down browsers on most regular phones) leading the pack at 9 percent, Windows Mobile in second place at 6.91 percent, and Symbian and Android following closely with a tie for third at 6.15 percent. The mysterious "Other" category accounts for 2.75 percent. What is perhaps most interesting about February's mobile OS market share numbers, however, is that the iPhone seems to have lost a little ground to the competition.

This corresponds with an article in the Dutch techmagazine Emerce, which featured an article which stated that iPhone users generally use 30 to 40 times more datatraffic than other mobile web users.

MindBlizzard statistics update

I've talked with a number of people on how hard it is to keep blogging. Since December 07 I've had a hard time keeping up with blogging at the pace I did before, and it showed in my technorati ratings. The positive thing is that the number of unique visitors is steadily going up again. Thanks folks for reading my thoughts.

MindBlizzard growing

The MindBlizzard blog has been up for just 4 months, but it's growing (too) fast...

Size

This is getting a regular habit I fear. Right now I'm having a hard time publishing to my blog. It's been barely a month ago that I upgraded my hostingaccount from 50 to 100 Mb and DataTraffic limits from 2 Gb/month to 4 Gb per month.

Now, halway through July I'm at 3.2 Gb Data Traffic already and have grown beyond 100Mb.
Maybe I should start considering getting a sponsor as well.

Reputation

To look on the bright side of life: In the past month my technorati rating has rocketed from autority 26 to authority 50, and closing in on the top 100K blogs. Not bad for a 4 month old blog.

Readers

In the past months I've seen various people comment on and link to my blog, such as:

• Aimee Weber (Aimee Weber Studios)
• Christian Renaud (Cisco)
• Ian Hughes (IBM)
• Jerry Paffendorf (Electric Sheep Company - at time of commenting)
• Justin Bovington (Rivers Run Red)
• Reuben Steiger (Millions of Us)
• Robert Scoble (Scobleizer)
• Trevor Smith (Ogoglio / Transmutable)

Pushing the Limit on SL

Most sims I've visited are maxed out on say what... 50 visitors? Something close to that. Why? If it gets above that Second Life gets slooooooooow, al those textures to be streamed to your client and all those prims. Wait a second, prims? Prims are the things you build, not the things you wear, right? Well partly.


Okay, here's a short short version to Second Life noobs [skip if you're well metaversed].

An island is a server, with server space and capacity. If you build things (buildings) on the island, you build them on the server. For building you use the Second Life building blocks called prims and you create objects. These objects are stored onto the server (with a usual max of 15.000 prims / building blocks), but the textures on the island/server/sim are stored in a central database or asset server. Both are streamed to your desktop as you come to the sim. Avatars (your virtual YOU) aren't made of prims but do use textures for clothing, which need to be uploaded to your desktop as well. Now there's one thing more. Quite a few residents of Second Life have tailored hairdo's, wigs that are made from prims, sometimes even upto 500 prims for a good looking hairdo.

So if everything has to be transferred to your client, you can imagine that 50 visitors bring more textures to stream than 25. If it's getting too much to load, Second Life becomes laggy. Which means you'll see gray people, your movement is slow etcetera.

All in all, I've been told that 99 people was an absolute max. Well it isn't. I just came across the island of mediascape, home to TJ's Icepalace, a danceclub and noticed there were 103 people present. Absolutely undoable I thought, since I've been at several sims wtih 50 people present and that was really laggy. This one wasn't! How do they do it?

It's a proper build, landscaped, buildings, boats, terraces etcetera... so how do they do it?

SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/mediascape/110/144/22

Virtual Traffic Jam

Second Life generates 7GB-8GB of traffic per second, and is currently supported by 8,000 servers. "When people see the broader architecture, they'll understand that's... it's Web-like. It's scalable," said Linden Lab CEO Philip Rosedale at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2007.

I did run a hosting sideshow at one time in my life (am still running a webserver with the full-monty somewhere) and discspace isn't the issue, hosting prices are basically determined by datatraffic nowadays. A regular European ISP will charge you about 1 euro per GB of datatraffic. So 8 euro's per second, 1,680 per minute, 100K per hour and 1.2 Million dollar per day.... I think they're getting quantum discount ;)

Right now, just at the end of the maintenance window, the Traffic Jam is actually happening. There's a new client version (1.5) that's been massively downloaded. The Second Life site is virtually dead right now.