Uptime monitoring service Pingdom analyzed the top 10,000 websites on the web and unsurprisingly found out that 74.6% of them are served on web servers run by open source software.

While it’s not surprising, it’s definitely impressive. Even more impressive is that Apache web service and nginx are used by 61% of the top 10k sites on the Web. Microsoft’s enterprise offering, which is of course not open source, IIS, is used by 14% of the sites that Pingdom checked out.

Just in case those numbers don’t resonate with you in print, here’s a graphical representation of open source’s absolute dominance:

While the type of server software a company might run depends on the needs of its product, it does appear that more companies are turning to open source solutions than ever. I remember a time, about five years ago, where I was laughed out of many meetings and discussions when I pushed open source as a reliable, safe, and stable option to run web servers.

Guess people caught on finally, eh?

Good things come to those who wait, as we learned with Instagram’s massive Android success. For those of us who still use laptop and desktop computers (crazy, right?), there still isn’t an official way to brose the beautiful photos on Instagram, other than one at a time.

For developer Brenden Mulligan this has been an persistently annoying issue, one that he’s taken quite a bit of time trying to solve himself. We told you about Mulligan’s work last December when he launched a service called PhotoPile, which was a pretty genius way of displaying your Instagram profile on the web. At the time, I claimed that he nailed what Instagram profiles should look like on the web.

Mulligan wasn’t finished though and has taken things a step further by launching an app called Webbygram, which is a web version of Instagram using its API. For me, I enjoy seeing photos on a larger screen, especially when they have as much detail as the filtered ones in my Instagram feed.

With Facebook purchasing Instagram in a fit of being hot-and-bothered in the mobile space, it doesn’t seem like a web verion of Instagram is in its roadmap, so Webbygram has come to save the day.

Simplicity at its finest

Why is Mulligan so obsessed with cracking the Instagram-on-the-web nut? Here’s a bit of his thinking process from his blog post announcing Webbygram:

Instagram is put on a pedestal for being “mobile first”, meaning they launched on mobile before they launched on the web. But that term isn’t “mobile only”. Unfortunately, that’s how Instagram has stayed. They provide some very rough web views of individual photos, but that’s it.

Some would say that Instagram doesn’t need a web presence. I disagree. When I click an Instagram link on Twitter, I want to have a slightly similar experience than I would within the app. I want to be able to like the photo, or comment, or dig deeper and see what other photos that user has posted. I don’t need to be able to change settings, or even see my own home screen. I just want to interact with posted photos.

Path has managed to create a beautiful “mobile first” product with a beautiful accompanying web view. They didn’t port the whole app to the web. They just brought the important interaction points. I brought this up on Twitter the other day.

Webbygram serves all of the purposes described by Mulligan above. Of course, the only thing missing in the web version is the ability to upload photos, something Instagram will probably never expose in a public API. Currently, the only app that can upload photos to Instagram is Hipstamatic, and that was a one-off partnership. I found the site to be extremely easy to navigate, showing the feed of people I follow as the default.

When you click into a photo view, you can interact with it the same way that you can within the Instagram app. Clearly the difference is that you’re doing so on your desktop instead of on a smaller screen:

You’ll also find the addition of pin-it buttons for Pinterest, along with nice and big share buttons for Facebook and Twitter. I’d love to see Google+ added into the mix. The ability to click hashtags that people add to their photos to discover a new stream of content is also a lovely edition that is perfect for a desktop browsing experience.

When it comes to commenting and liking a photo, you’ll also find the same simplicity. The design here is magnificent and it feels like you’re still within the “Instagram Experience” that you find on its mobile apps:

My favorite thing to do on a plane, when there’s WIFI, is scroll through photos. It’s extremely relaxing and I find that during this time I tend to interact with Instagram photos the most. I have a few long trips ahead of me, so being able to have the same experience on my laptop is something that I’m looking forward to.

Mulligan says that he is all-ears when it comes to feedback, so if there’s something missing from the Webbygram experience, you should definitely leave him some feedback here or through the site. This is the reason why APIs are so magical, developers can pick up where a company has decided to drop a ball, and run with it in a way that serves purposes for everyone who wants in on the action.

➤ Webbygram

I’ll be the first one to tell you that my iPhone and Android devices are glorified, and over-priced, note-taking devices. I use the iOS version of Notes more than any other application on my phone. I know that without even having to think twice about it.

I constantly take notes, be it during a meeting or while I’m sitting on a plane. Whenever I have an idea, or need to remember specific details like a confirmation number, I jump right into the notes app. That’s why Fetchnotes was interesting to me, because the company has a solution for the Web and both Android and iOS mobile devices.

We’ve written about Fetchnotes before, well kind of. You might remember them as the crew who accidentally cursed at its users when it was testing a new email system, which actually spiked usage amongst its beta users.

Just for fun sakes, here’s that email:

If you’re a note-taker, you’re going to love what the team has cooked up for you. I’ve stayed in contact with the Fetchnotes CEO and co-founder Alex Schiff since that hilarious email test, and the company has delivered on its promise for seamless note-taking and sharing over multiple devices.

Mobile, Web, and Desktop

When you use Fetchnotes on the web you’ll notice and extremely simple interface that allows you to add notes quickly. By slapping in a hashtag anywhere in your note, it will be turned into a tag that will group those notes together:

The services saves your note as you type, so you don’t have to worry about clicking save every few minutes. With the web version of Fetchnotes you can also search your entire log of notes, as you see on services like iOS notes and Evernote. I’ve never really been a fan of using Evernote, only because all of the things I jot down are text-only, and I don’t have a need for most of its features.

The mobile versions of Fetchnotes are slick and act exactly like you’d expect as well. When you log in from your device, all of your notes will come up and you’ll be able to tap your way through them based on tag or by searching for them.

Fetchnotes also has a desktop widget for Mac users which is nothing more than an open box that’s connected to your account and ready to receive your braindumps:

While Notes is a great iOS service, especially since its been rolled into the desktop version of OS X in Mountain Lion, your notes aren’t available when you’re using your browser on the web.

Fetchnotes makes your important content available no matter where you are and no matter what device you’re using and that’s why it’s something that I can see myself using daily. The fact that I can annotate notes that I took on my iPhone with my Android tablet is a pretty awesome thing.

Protip: If you don’t have the app installed, you can register your cell and retrieve your notes by texting the service. For example, you could text “fetch #groceries”, and all of your notes about groceries will be texted to you. Neat, huh?

➤ Fetchnotes for Web, iOS, and Android

If you’re a heavy foursquare user like I am, you know that your check-in data from over the years is pretty interesting to look at. While it’s extremely interesting, you might not have known how useful it could be. Part of the reason for that is because foursquare has focused on creating a killer app that allows you to log all of the places you visit for yourself, and for your friends.

Today, foursquare took a gigantic leap forward by bringing its “Explore” offering to the web. Last November, the company gave its website a huge facelift by making foursquare places look prettier and easier to discover. This release goes way further than that, finally turning all of that check-in data into a real actionable web experience.

By pulling together its 1,500,000,000 check-ins, “tens of millions” of tips, and over half million lists, foursquare has now become more of a complete service. Here’s what the company had to say about Explore for the web:

Finally, because Explore is powered by check-ins and foursquare Tips, it’s not just personalized, it’s specific. Search for ‘pool table,’ or ‘guacamole’; ‘deep dish,’ or ‘thin crust.’ Because not all bars, Mexican restaurants, or pizza joints are created equal, and we want to make sure you find what you’re craving.

As the company has made efforts to make it easier to not only check-in, but share tips and specific information about a location, that data can now be used in any number of ways. We’ve already seen it in action with mashups like FoursCrowd, that predicts how busy a particular spot might be.

When you visit Explore on the web and login to your account, you’re presented with a map and search options. It now becomes a community driven and extremely social version of Google Maps, and also a way better offering than Google Places.

The results themselves display in a way that makes all of the data you and your friends have given over the years seem worthwhile. If you’re looking for pizza in your area, you’ll be shown a map of all of the local places, along with information about them on the left. It’s not just information pulled from businesses or Yelp, it’s information that matters to you. You’re shown which of your friends have checked in, as well as pictures and tips about the venue.

It’s as if this was foursquare’s master plan all along. To provide a rich experience like this, you need massive amounts of data. Phase 1 was the app, which brought the company that data. This phase brings everything together in a way that absolutely blows Google’s properties out of the water. Why? Because when you search for Places on Google, there’s not much information there.

While foursquare has done deals with media properties for promotional purposes and specials with companies like American Express, this is the type of product that is easily monetizable. For example, foursquare could simply sell a premium listing that would show at the top of the results, much like Google does.

By pulling all of our data together and presenting it to us in this useful fashion, foursquare has somehow found a way to make us want to use its service more often. Google on the other hand hasn’t found that “hook” as of yet with its social properties.

➤ foursquare Explore

According to a new report from Nielsen, Microsoft is the most visited consumer electronics brand on the web. All of its sites totaled 94 million unique visitors in the U.S. in September 2011 alone.

That’s great, but can Microsoft keep people on its properties long enough to turn them into loyal brand followers and customers? Not compared to Apple, says this report.

When it comes to time spent on consumer electronics sites, those visiting Apple’s web properties spent the most time on them. In September 2011, 68.7 million people who visited Apple on the web averaged one hour and two minutes clicking around. That’s more than twenty minutes longer than Microsoft visitors, who spent an average of forty-two minutes on its sites.

There are numerous reasons as to why Apple surfers spend more time perusing its sites, one of them being that the experience is more interactive and pleasing to the eye. For example, Apple features long-form video content on its homepage which usually consists of well-produced product demos and commercials.

However, Microsoft does have a 26 million visitor edge compared to Apple. The mix of visitors include IT professionals and companies making bulk purchases, so it would be fair to say that Microsoft’s visitors aren’t on its sites to peruse, they’re there to get in and get out quickly.

As you know, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) jeopardizes the way we use the Internet today, and could halt innovation that we’ve enjoyed on the web since its inception.

One of those who benefitted from the web as we know it is Reddit Co-Founder Alexis Ohanian. Reddit has become one of the most popular, and sometimes controversial, social networks on the net.

To speak his mind about SOPA, Ohanian is currently hosting a live telethon to discuss what the act will do to our rights, as well as drive more phone calls and emails to those in Congress, to put the act to a halt. He’ll also be commenting live on the House Judiciary Committee hearing on SOPA.

Oharian had this to say about the Stop Online Piracy Act:

This legislation affects my entire industry and livelihood. We never would’ve been able to start Reddit if SOPA were the law, and I worry about all of the future innovation we’d miss out on if it were to pass. And I have no idea what I’d do with myself.

You can watch the live telethon here, and tweet with the hashtags #sopatelethon and #sopa to have your voice heard.

Sarcasm and the Internet go hand in hand. You certainly can’t have one without the other. But for so long, we’ve had to express our sarcasm with weird tags and fonts, which made being sarcastic such a chore.

That all stops now, thanks to the creators of “Sarcastic Font”, which is italics, but in reverse. Simply genius! Here is their manifesto to support the need for a sarcasm font:

For too long e-mails, instant messages, web pages and documents have been unable to fully communicate the subtleties of sarcasm. Text delivered without intonation fail to represent the rare form of language where the intended meaning is the opposite of the written word.

Over the internet we yell at each other with ALL CAPS and emphasize with bold and italics, but where is sarcasm? Where is the nuance, the elegance? We say it is time for a change. It’s time for a revolution. It’s time for a new font style!

What would that look like? Have a gander at “Ariel Sarcasm”:

Now, it’s not easy to get the world to adopt a font. Millions would have to install and use it to gain traction, but how many times have you been sarcastic in an email and the recipient just flat out doesn’t get it?

Happens all of the time.

Usage Guide

As with any font, there should be a guide on how to use it. Luckily, there’s one for the Sarcastic Font:

• Use to your own natural level of sarcasm. (note that a sharp rise in the use of sarcasm may change one’s circle of friends)
• Unless you’re writing a long sarcastic rant, it’s most effective to highlight a phrase or two in a sarcastic font than to write an entire note in it.
• Bold a sarcastic font for really sarcastic comments.
• A sarcastic font is especially useful when writing to others in a foreign language. They may not understand what you’re saying, but they’ll know it’s sarcastic.

Check out the website and install the early versions of the Sarcastic Font. Be sure to tell all of your friends about it too, so they know that you’re being sarcastic. Not about the font though, that’s real. We think.

As we know, sharing photos is one of the most popular things to do on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr. The act of sharing photos has also spawned services like Flickr, Instagram, and 500px who serve that purpose exclusively.

While you probably haven’t gotten around to storing all of your photos in one place with a service like Snapjoy, it can be a maddening experience to try to figure out which site you shared what photo on. Especially if you’re trying to show one to someone at a bar or family function.

SuperAlbum won’t store all of your photos for you, but the iOS app will let you view all of your shared photos from one interface within the app. It’s extremely well done, and fixes a problem I’ve been facing for years.

The app is $.99 cents, which is a steal if you’re facing the problem of “where did I post that photo?” like I am.

All the photos

Once you open up SuperAlbum, you connect the app with all of your accounts. Luckily, most services provide quick and painless authorization, so this shouldn’t take but a few minutes. After you’ve connected your accounts, you can start taking a look at all of the photos you’ve shared over the years.

The thing you’ll notice right away, is that SuperAlbum has a prettier and easier to navigate interface than most of the apps it supports. For example, one of my major gripes with Instagram is that I can’t swipe through a feed of photos, or through someone’s personal collection. SuperAlbum lets you do just that.

Additionally, SuperAlbum will let you save any picture you see onto your iDevice’s Camera Roll, which is really handy if you’re trying to text or email it to someone. The app will also let you tweet a picture instantly, or send it to another application for editing or sharing that SuperAlbum works with, seamlessly.

For the price, SuperAlbum is completely worth it, and as soon as I started using it, I didn’t feel like my pictures were as scattered around the Internet as I first thought. Some of the other services out there should take note of SuperAlbum’s features their own adoption, as I find that even Facebook’s app is sluggish when cycling through photos.

➤SuperAlbum

Agile work environments aren’t just for developers and engineers anymore. Project management software has been a mainstay on the web to handle teams in different locations and handle projects with many moving pieces.

More and more mainstream companies are looking to the web for management tools, and WorkSimple has built an elegant solution to handle tasks, goals, communication, and employee feedback.

Tracking the progress of a task is simply too boring to keep employees involved, so companies like WorkSimple and Rypple are gamifying management by letting colleagues praise you for a job well done. WorkSimple does this well, and has more project management features than Rypple does.

The company calls itself “The Social Goal management Company”, and I’ve found that the platform would be great for any type of collaborative goal tracking. Recently, WorkSimple released an app for its platform called “Praise”. The praise app encourages positive feedback on tasks and goals, with a familiar social network effect within a team when someone is praised.

The standout feature of WorkSimple is “WorkStory”, which shows all of your tasks and goals in a timeline, and allows the employee to publish goals and achievements to LinkedIn.

I interviewed Morgan Norman, CEO and founder of WorkSimple about innovation to better the workplace:

TNW: What is lacking about the workplace that leaves so much room for innovation?

Morgan Norman: Today’s employee is asked to more than they ever had to do. The pace of work has changed. Employees and managers need new ways to have better conversations around work, results, and simply what’s going on.

Employees and coworkers need to feel better about their contributions and accomplishments. Both need to get and give recognition when it matters. But much has shifted in the modern workplace, priorities change daily, new goals arise.

Goals are no longer heavy, top down, annual or quarterly. They are agile, lightweight, easy to change easy to update, and flexible.

This is where WorkSimple comes in, picking up where performance management left off. Performance management tried to help the conversation between manager and employee — but it didn’t work or engage.

We help employees share their good efforts and work. Employees can showcase both shorter-term goals and long-term goals. While goals can be assigned, the system is designed from the bottom up — which allows for self-organizing and helps engage the workforce vs. top down models.

For companies that choose to go this path, they ultimately acquire a more engaged workforce that finds a greater meaning in their everyday work. To make goal sharing engaging and useful, employees can use an application that looks familiar to other consumer applications such as Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter.

TNW: Is surfacing this information making Managers jobs easier or harder? Meaning, more data, more work?

Morgan Norman: Certainly, it’s making managers’ jobs easier. The hardest thing to do is helping everyone share, track and communicate what they are not just working on, but what they are trying to accomplish. It’s easy for managers and employees to forget about the priorities of the team.

Most managers are switching focus, trying to keep up and can lose track of: What has changed? What new requests does the team have? What did we accomplish last week, last month?

What other teams are working on that impacts your success. This is where WorkSimple comes in and provides value to the manager and the coworker. WorkSimple is driven by employees vs. top down. When employees set goals, everyone is alerted on their activity stream, through daily digests, and reminders.

Workers today can’t simply keep everything at the top of their mind. WorkSimple shines here and helps everyone know what’s coming next and what we are focused on. WorkSimple keeps that information at the forefront.

TNW: Are companies actually able to spend their time on better projects because of WorkSimple?

Morgan Norman: Not only are companies able to spend their time on better projects, but suddenly they see projects running that they didn’t know were going on. We find that that is one of the biggest gaps in how managers evaluate employee performance today — they forget about the other 90 percent of work that employees are doing everyday to keep their companies running. We want to surface and recognize those efforts.

TNW: Tell us about your team and why WorkSimple does it best

Morgan Norman: Like many of our customers, we have the same challenge internally. We have two primary locations with multiple secondary locations. We have to coordinate teams without conference calls and team meetings — with single updates and priority changes.

We had a relentless focus on making goals and work meaningful and collaborative for three years now. This means a design that works for the broader employee community vs. a platform design for tracking workers like many systems out there. Our ultimate goal is to help every employee remember his or her accomplishments and get recognition.

Feedback and Recognition is a wonderful thing in the workplace, and we are the first to make goals lightweight, employee-oriented vs. big heavy performance reviews and management tracking systems. It’s all about the employee — and finally they have a system that is designed for them. Part of what makes us well suited for this is that we have a free product (which will continue to remain free) that you can use with unlimited users.

The difficulty with any service like this in the workplace is getting everyone engaged and using the system. It’s probably a good idea to test WorkSimple out with a smaller team or department within your organization, and then share your successes with the higher-ups.

Getting started with WorkSimple is free, with pricing models based on extra features ranging from $5 to $9 for each employee. The free version will be more than enough for you and your team to get comfortable with the base functionality of WorkSimple.

Sharing on the web is something that we all do. Be it sharing a link on Twitter or Recommending something on Facebook, it’s something we do everyday. This is great for our friends and family, as they are seeing content that they probably wouldn’t have stumbled onto themselves. But I’m going to ask the question that nobody seems to be asking.

What’s in it for us?

Asking what we’re getting out of sharing may sound selfish. In fact, getting something in return for sharing sounds downright wrong. However, with as much time that we spend on the web curating, digging, and finding great content to share with others, we actually deserve something significant in return.

But what?

Yes, we’re getting to meet new people and keep in contact with people that we care about, and that’s very important. I’m asking a very different question though. When we share something on the web, we don’t think about the effect that it has on others. Sure, someone can retweet us, favorite our post, or like something, but that doesn’t really give us the feedback we need when we’re putting in the time to say “Hey, this is cool!”. I’m not going to focus on whether we’ll get paid for sharing, because that’s a whole different topic. I personally worry about what I’ll be able to get out of the content that I’ve shared five or ten years from now. How about when I have kids? Will I be able to show them exactly what I was checking out on November 7th, 2007? It’s not looking so bright for that so far.

I’m going to discuss how the most popular services are going about giving us something back for what we’re putting into it. Or more specifically, how these services are going about personal aggregation and analytics.

Facebook

Facebook just made the first big step in personal aggregation with its Timeline feature. It’s not publicly available yet, but it’s going to change the way we use Facebook completely. When I visit your profile, I could view things that you posted in 2008. That may sound like stalking, but really what it does is let me see how you and your tastes have evolved over the years. For example, you may have listened to a lot of Dave Matthews Band in 2008, but now you’re more of a John Mayer fan. Until Timeline, you’d have to click a “more” button over and over to go through someone’s Wall posts on Facebook. What a bad experience.

For me personally, this type of aggregation is exciting. I am really excited to remember the places I’ve been and the things that I said in the context of months and years. That’s really what Facebook was missing before Timeline, the context. A lot of other services are missing that too.

Twitter

Twitter is probably my favorite service to use. I have tweeted some of the most important milestones and moments of my life. I was using Twitter before it launched, and certainly before it went mainstream. Can I search for those tweets? No. That to me is nearly data robbery. I feel like I’ve put so much effort into Twitter for myself and for others, yet I can’t reference any of it. Twitter search only makes the last 5-7 days worth of tweets available. I can however go through my tweets by infinitely scrolling through them. Like Facebook’s wall before Timeline, that is a horrible user experience.

Twitter tells me who my followers are, who I follow, and how many times I’ve tweeted, yet leaves out all other context about what’s most important…the actual tweets. Sure, I can favorite tweets, including my own, but that’s a lot to ask.

I want to see my tweets in a timeline, I don’t want to have to work hard to browse through them. In a second I want to see what I tweeted 2 years ago today. I think we deserve that much, especially since Twitter is starting to monetize the service. For as much funding as they have, they certainly don’t seem to be putting in a lot of work into user interface and experience. Relying on third parties for these types of features won’t work, since Twitter has choked companies usage of its API.

Google+

Google+ is the new kid in town, and like all of Google’s products, it’s driven by search. That’s actually a way better experience than Twitter right now. But again, there is no interface or visualization of what I’m posting, who has shared it, and how much activity certain things have generated. Google+ has released a read-only API, so maybe some developers will build great features outside of the service itself.

The thing that worries me about this is that third-party services rarely get popular with people other than geeks. People tend to trust the main company and product, and use only what they’re given. It’s only really curious geeks and nerds who go digging for a new experience by way of a third-party. Perhaps Google+ will have an App Store like Facebook has when it launches Open Graph, so that users can find the experiences and visualizations that they want, without having to leave Google+.

FourSquare

What excited me the most about FourSquare wasn’t becoming the mayor of a venue or checking in with all of my friends. It was storing the information about where I’ve been and what I’ve done for years to come. I personally travel a lot and visit a lot of bars, restaurants, and venues. I simply can’t remember everywhere that I’ve been. FourSquare actually does an amazing job at showing you in a visual way what you’ve done and where you’ve been over the years. Unfortunately, most of this is shown on their website, which most people don’t use. Luckily, the company is weaving this data into their app more and more, showing you how many different coffee shops you’ve been to, for example.

Parents tell their kids stories about where they were on this day or that day, but generations to come are inquisitive and want the information to be completely accurate. Accurate information being readily available is essential to the future of our own personal family legacies. Imagine knowing what your Grandfather was doing and where he was in 1965, along with a photo. You’d be hard pressed to find someone who wouldn’t want to know that.

Delicious, Utopic, and bookmarking services

Bookmarking services tend to perpetuate the problem of sharing into the ether. Those services want to make it super easy for you to share and share and share, so that they can collect the best content on the web. Sure, it’s great that you can go back and reference all of the cool things you’ve found, but that’s not enough. The context of why you shared something is lost, and a “note” feature isn’t going to do it. Entering notes is boring and nobody does it. I want the things that I bookmark to be surrounded with other context, like what other things I’m doing on my computer at the time.

Things are moving fast, and it’s a real-time and instant gratification society. We’re all caught up in the world wide web and we continue to weave this web by sharing, retweeting, liking, and recommending content.

At the end of the day though, what are we going to get out of it? The internet is our digital scrapbook, after all.

I’m not asking for a paycheck or a thank you, but I think it would be nice if these important companies with a lot of funding would start thinking longer term for its users. I’ve used Twitter for over six years, Facebook for just as long, and FourSquare a few years as well. I’ve put a lot of time and energy into making sure I’ve shared and tracked all of the things that were important to me in the moment. These companies are starting to figure out how to make money on all of the things that we say and share.

It’s these services turn to remind us of why we do it in the first place.