Written in December 2005:

It took 36 years for the Internet to get its first billion users. The second billion will probably be added by 2015; most of these new users will be in Asia. The third billion will be harder, and might not be reached until 2040.

Nielsen returned to the post in 2012 to note that the 2bn mark was passed in early 2011, just six years after the first, and four years earlier than he had expected. Most of the growth was in Asia, which should hit a billion in 2012. But he thinks that we won't see the second doubling to 4bn before 2017. He reckons it will be 3bn by then. Make a diary date...

Updated for the 14 days to May 1 showing the version running on devices accessing Google Play (the Android Market as was). Points of interest: the proportion of devices running 1.5 and 1.6 has remained static at 1% cumulatively for the past two months; Gingerbread (released near the end of 2010) is the majority, at 64.6%; Ice Cream Sandwich has passed Honeycomb (4.9% v 3.3%); devices running 2.1 ("Eclair") outnumber ICS ones (5.5% v 4.9%). ICS was released over six months ago.

Having noticed the Google CEO’s fondness for using variations of “exciting” and “excited” when discussing his company’s products and businesses, we at AllThingsD had a bit of fun with the transcripts from his recent earnings calls.</p><p>
Since Page reassumed the CEO role last year, he hit an all-time high of 16 mentions of “excited” on last year’s third-quarter call. His company’s performance made him both “incredibly excited” and “amazingly excited.”

Awesome.

I'd like to fill in the picture I began in my recent <a href="http://pxldot.com/post/18281312362/android-measuring-stick">post</a> on Android fragmentation by examining the changes in version distribution of the other major mobile operating system: iOS.

Unfortunately, this was no quite as easy as it was for Android. Unlike Google, Apple does not publish the version distribution of its user base. What we do have, however, is a number of developers who have published the version distribution within their own apps, and if we can collect a large enough sample it may be feasible to use these in lieu of direct vendor-supplied data.

Using 50 data points from different developers, we can indeed build an image of version distribution over time for iOS just as we did for Android. Note that these are bundled into major releases. Grouping these into the major releases reduced noise and also matched the groupings more closely to those I used for the Android post — while it may not be a direct Apples-to-Apples comparison, it is likely the best we can do.

Beautiful, beautiful graphics (which suggest that iOS 5 reached 75% of users in less than a month - huh?) but it overlooks the fact that Google really doesn't care about fragmentation. All it wants is to have people connecting to the internet and using its search engine.

Remember those stats about Google+ users?

This isn’t the first time Google has tried to mislead with statistics about Google+. In July, Page claimed that the service had <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/14/larry-page-on-google-over-10-million-users-1-billion-items-shared/">10 million users who shared 1 billion items a day</a>.

That sounds incredibly impressive. But let’s do the math.  That would mean that the average user was sharing 100 items a day. Robert Scoble was flooding my feed before I blocked him, but I don’t think even he was sharing 100 items a day. (I have since unblocked him.)

So how did we get to that number? Well, it turns out Google was counting every potential recipient of that message. A single message from Scoble today would count 240,000 times toward that number. That’s preposterous.

Google is by no means alone in how it plays with numbers. This deception happens nearly every day and is especially rampant in Silicon Valley where new business models are created and standard metrics aren’t always available. It also reflects the optimistic nature of the Valley. We want to see exponential growth. We see hockey sticks everywhere. Even worse, these statistics get thrown around in the echo chamber and presented as fact. And as they get reblogged and retweeted, they lose the disclaimers that made them technically true in the first place.

The contrast between the installation penetration of Flash and Silverlight is interesting.

From the OpenViz blog: "Those of you with longer memories will recall my post back in May, promoting the then new triple store for DCLG’s Indices of Deprivation.<br />
"I’d love to report that this has generated a flurry of new apps.  I think I’m not alone when I say: we need some more real-world examples which show us the true power and potential of blending together different data sources….over the web…..using open standards."<br />
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Very impressive demonstration. The thought that occurs on seeing it is that indices don't tell you much about behaviour or other things; they don't provide any predictive power, and that's what's lacking.

A useful guide, though roundabout. Anecdotal - but good.

"Steam conducts a monthly survey to collect data about what kinds of computer hardware and software our customers are using. Participation in the survey is optional, and anonymous. The information gathered is incredibly helpful to us as we make decisions about what kinds of technology investments to make and products to offer."<br />
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It's also really interesting to see the cross-section of Steam users.

"After we brought crime maps into the world, we decided take a deeper look at when crime typically happens throughout the day in 25 big cities across the country. What did we find? Well, as the old adage goes, crime doesn’t pay…but it sure does look like it’s working 9 to 5 (plus a nightshift) in some cities."<br />
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Fascinating graphs.

An interesting data point from July 2008: "Gartner’s latest figures put the number of installed PCs worldwide as just having surpassed 1 billion units and at a growth rate of just under 12 percent annually, will surpass 2 billion units by early 2014.<br />
"So currently, it would appear, there are at least three times as many active mobile phones in the world as there are PCs, and internet access via the mobile phone is outpacing wireless access from a PC in many of areas of the world."<br />
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Mature markets (North America, western Europe, Japan) counted for 58% of installed PCs, but just 15% of the population. Gartner expected uptake to increase rapidly in emerging markets. We'll have to ask them...

"You can’t just turn your Data Scientist eye onto something and say 'Oh we’ll throw this into MapReduce, it’ll be awesome', you need to have been part of that data, to have lived it. We don’t have Big Data where I work at the Guardian, we have lots-of-data, we look at Big Data out there and attempt to consume the signals. I came from Flickr which had fairly big fast data, the Guardian is positively quaint in comparison (in terms of what it generates). I set myself the task of getting immersed in the flow of news, trying to understand how the organization worked, the signals, the input, the output. The difference between news on a Monday to news on a Friday, the waves that Google and other sites can throw at you and so on. Living in the data, watching its rhythms, the pulse, the flow. I’m getting there, it takes a while, maybe I’m just old :)<br />
"To deal with big data you have to have been in it, not a Scientist but as a Dancer."

A really subtle example of lying with graphs - by changing the amounts that each subdivision includes. The graph used by the Wall Street Journal uses different sizes of division for the lower-paid (sub $100,000, it's $5-10K; above, you get a $500K-$1M division).<br />
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Because it's tilted, you don't read it, except to note that the biggest bar is at the $100K-200K division. So the middle classes must have all the cash, right? Wrong.

Qualities observed in people from the Hunch network. This is one that definitely wouldn't attract any comments, right?