The Internet’s favorite top-level domain is close to hitting a huge milestone. The .com domain is now on the brink of reaching 100 million registered domain names. It’s a real triumph for what is already by far the world’s largest top-level domain – it accounts for around 45% of all domain names.

It’s not quite there yet, though. There are currently 98 million registered .com domain names, so there are still two million to go. Judging by the chart here below from Registrar Stats, we will reach the 100-million milestone within a few months, sometime around the end of this year.

The .com domain is one of the original top-level domains on the Internet, having been around since 1985 and the start of the Domain Name System that we all depend upon so much.

To give you an idea of how the .com domain has grown since its inception, we’ve put together this chart for you:

The number for December 2010 is an estimate based on the Registrar Stats chart and an old domain name industry brief from Verisign. The others come from BV.com.

Quite amazing, isn’t it? Especially when you compare today’s numbers with the modest beginnings in the 1980s and early 1990s, before the World Wide Web (you may have heard of it) made everyone flock to the Internet.

P.S. If you wonder about the jagged section in the chart from Registrar Stats, here is the explanation.

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The current big international social networks are Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and the newly formed Google+, and perhaps Tumblr, if you choose to look at it as a social network. However, go back to around 2004-2005 and these were either not around yet, or just taking their early baby steps. Back then the big ones were Friendster, LiveJournal and MySpace.

And we’re talking in past tense, because oh how the mighty have fallen. Web users are a fickle bunch, and there is probably no market as trend sensitive as social networking.

How bad is it? As you’ll see, they’re all caught in a downward spiral, but they might have peaked later in life than you think.

MySpace
Started in 2003, MySpace was the big dog before Facebook stole its thunder. It was a pretty strong player until quite recently, especially in the United States.

At its peak in 2007-2008, the then News Corp-owned MySpace was valued at $12 billion. In June this year, News Corp. sold MySpace for $35 million and a 5% stake in the new owner, Specific Media.

Worldwide interest in MySpace, 2004 – today:

Worldwide site traffic to Myspace, 2009 – today:

(There’s more information over at Wikipedia, if you want to read up on MySpace’s history.)

Friendster
Started in 2002, Friendster quickly became a huge success (it’s the site that inspired MySpace) and pretty much became a blueprint for the modern-day social network. It went from being popular everywhere, to mostly being used in Asia, especially SE Asia, which has remained its power base.

In May this year, Friendster pretty much committed harakiri – at least as a social network – and was completely redesigned to focus on social gaming.

Worldwide interest in Friendster, 2004 – today:

Worldwide site traffic to Friendster, 2009 – today:

(You can read more about Friendster’s history over at Wikipedia.)

LiveJournal
Started in 1999, LiveJournal is a blogging service with strong social elements. In many ways it’s one of the social networking pioneers. To give you an idea of its status, early in the movie The Social Network, Mark Zuckerberg (as played by Jesse Eisenberg) is seen blogging on LiveJournal. The scene takes place in 2003.

In 2009, after having been bought by a Russian company (SUP) a couple of years earlier, the operation of LiveJournal was moved from the United States to Russia.

Worldwide interest in LiveJournal, 2004 – today:

Worldwide site traffic to Livejournal, 2009 – today:

(More about LiveJournal’s history over at Wikipedia.)

“Hold on, we’re not dead yet!”
The funny thing is, relatively speaking these social networks are still big. They still have millions of users. They haven’t died, they’ve just fallen from grace, most of their users having left for greener pastures.

It’s like one of those aging Hollywood movie stars of yesteryear, still good, but no longer cast in the best roles and no longer able to pull the crowds to the theaters.

“I used to be famous,” she said with a sigh. “I used to be a star.”

This was a post from the guys at Pingdom, a site monitoring service that makes sure you're the first to know when your site is down. Check it out for free.

How many rooms in your home? This has been a census question in the UK since 1871. But what does the number and type of rooms say about how houses have evolved over the centuries?

Duncan shares an excellent compilation of photographs depicting New York, San Francisco, Dubai, Shanghai, and Newcastle through the ages. He throws in the Upsala Glacier in Argentina for good measure or rather to measure the impact of global warming

Here’s what Generation Y doesn’t want: formal living rooms, soaker bathtubs, dependence on a car.

In other words, they don’t want their parents’ homes.

What do *you* want?

Mathew Moore, the last of four generations to farm his family's land outside of Phoenix, AZ presents an excellent visualization through time starting from the 1910s about how sprawl is gradually knocking on his doorsteps.

Cairo has become so crowded, congested and polluted that the Egyptian government has undertaken a construction project that might have given the Pharaohs pause: building two megacities outside Cairo from scratch. By 2020, planners expect the new satellite cities to house at least a quarter of Cairo’s 20 million residents and many of the government agencies that now have headquarters in the city.

As the author notes, only a country with limitless supply of open albeit desert land and an authoritarian government can come up with such a solution. Something similar was planned and executed on the mainland to ease Mumbai's (India) problem. Last I heard, the nodes of Navi Mumbai (New Bombay) had a population of nearly 3 million and rising.

I have four big predictions to share for what the web will look like in the near future. This is what I expect in the evolution of our online lives

It's basically a list of all the "best ofs" from the 2000s.

KOSMIX, a well-financed Silicon Valley start-up, is often described on blogs and news sites as a search engine that may someday rival Google. As flattering as that notion may sound, it rankles Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman, the co-founders of Kosmix. And that’s not because other start-ups making similar assertions have fallen laughably short of the mark.

Real investigative journalism?

In 2009, Twitter will become much more tightly integrated with the rest of the blog in a variety of ways - watch out for tweetbacks and tweetstats to make their debut, and tweet comments to TwitterRolls to start appearing on blogs. Here are 10 ways Twitter will impact blogs this year.

This motorized exoskeleton concept looks like the lovechild of Ironman and a Segway—but is it the future of transportation?

Consequences of the global food crisis

"The individual user has been king on the Internet, but the pendulum seems to be swinging back toward edited information vetted by professionals." So much for Digg-ifying everything in sight, eh?

This is an aggregation of popular search queries gathered from various sources across the web. This list is updated once per day.