Curious to learn who’s still keeping the Vista spirt alive in the world, Pingdom took a look at the global market share of operating systems to find out who exactly still uses this OS (and then troll those parts of the world unforgivably) (actually, the Pingdom people didn’t troll anybody for their OS choices). After looking at data for 216 countries, Windows Vista was found to still be in use among 10.5% of all desktop operative systems. Windows 7 commanded the greatest portion of desktop OS market shares with 44% and Windows XP claimed 35% of all market shares.

And in case you’e wondering which country out there is still using Vista the most: Ireland. Oddly, the country with the lowest percentage of Windows Vista usage was Cuba. As much as I want to tease out conclusions from these findings, I wouldn’t go too far in extrapolating conclusions about the cultural climate of either country based on their Vista usage (or lack thereof), but simply smile, say an amused “Humh,” and enjoy the new piece of tech trivia. And really, the world seems to still love it some Vista: out of all 216 countries included in Pingdom’s survey, 182 of them – that’s 84.2% – Windows Vista is the third most commonly used OS.

One piece of trivia I do enjoy, however, and that does have some small validity to it: Windows Vista is still more popular worldwide than Mac OS X. In fact, only 16 countries in the world use Mac OS X more than Vista. And surprisingly, 2 countries out there can say that more PCs use Linux than Vista.

So if you’re one of the many out there still rocking the Windows Vista, I invite you to share with us in the comments why you’ve remained attached to this particular OS system over the years.

Google’s Gmail traffic is only exceeded by traffic to Google.com itself.

“The actual percentages aren’t really all that important here. What’s important to note is that the subdomains used for webmail have a ranking near or at the top for all three companies,” Pingdom says on its blog. “Imagine the hit to their web presence if they didn’t have these webmail services.”

“Email has been declared dead several times over the past few years. The truth, however, is that we still depend on it more than most people realize, and there is no replacement in sight,” Pingdom says. “Google knows this. Microsoft knows this. Yahoo knows this. They know that their email services are still extremely important.”

They also make a good point in that the email services of these companies provide ways they can get other offerings i front of customers. Pingdom uses Google Buzz as an example, which was launched within Gmail. While Buzz may not be the most successful product of all time, it certainly put the service right in front of users.

In fact, Google has added a lot of things to Gmail over the years, such as GTalk, video chat, and of course ads, which are based on words that appear in conversations you have in your email.

This week, Yahoo began rolling out its all new feature-rich version of Yahoo Mail. Email would appear to be more critical to Yahoo’s strategy than even Google or Microsoft’s, as Yahoo Mail makes up the majority of traffic to Yahoo.com.

Email isn’t just important to these three major web entities either. Even the newer-genartion social media compnaies recognize the signifiance of email. Facebook has gone so far as to launch its own email addresses, and Twitter just started rolling out email notifications for more of its features, in an effort to drive further engagement with the service.

Earlier this month, MarketTools released a study commissioned by Microsoft, indicating that 45% say their use of email at work will most likely increase in the next year. 51% said it would likely stay the same, and only 4% thought it would decrease. At home, 36% said it will increase, 55% said it will stay the same, and only 6% said it will decrease.

Credit for constructing the infographic goes to Pingdom, and if you’re curious, the stats come from a combination of Mozilla, Wikipedia, and Net Applications. Now let’s dive into the data.

One section of the infographic explains that there have been over 1.35 billion Firefox downloads since 2004, and there are currently around 400 million Firefox users worldwide. Also, to drive home the point that Firefox has been successful on a global scale, Pingdom pointed out that over half of users utilize non-English versions of the browser.

As for some info about add-ons, it seems more than 200,000 of them have been created, at least 33 percent of users have one installed, and there have been a total of 2.4 billion add-on downloads.

Those are some impressive figures, especially considering that Firefox had to compete head-on with Internet Explorer right from the start (Pingdom reported that IE held a market share of over 90 percent when Firefox 1.0 launched). Not a lot of other products could have survived Microsoft’s full attention at that point in time.

By the way, to return to the present, the official download counter for Firefox 4 has shot up and up since its release, and as this article’s going live, it currently sits at 17,090,377.

Take a look at the diagram (based on Alexa stats and constructed by Pingdom) for yourself below.  It almost gives the impression of a board game just four or five minutes before the losing child throws a fit and knocks all the pieces off.

Plus, making the situation even more embarrassing for everything-not-Facebook, there’s the fact that the social network’s been blocked in China, meaning the local market leaders haven’t really beat it.

Anyway, a post on the Royal Pingdom blog observed, "Facebook is still weak in Japan, which is also one of the world’s largest online markets."  Also, "Facebook is significantly less popular in much of Eastern Europe and Russia than in the rest of Europe."

Count on Facebook applying a little extra pressure in these areas in the future, perhaps making a special effort to get translations just right.

It should be interesting to see how the map changes over the course of the next six months or year as a result.

Indeed, according to Pingdom’s analysis (which was based on StatCounter’s data), about 70.9 percent of all Internet users are up-to-date in this respect, and that’s not bad at all.  Apparently a lot of computer users manage to follow prompts or even seek out the latest software on their own.

Of course, a couple of the data points may not deserve to be celebrated.  A post on the Royal Pingdom blog mentioned, "It’s not strange that Chrome ‘wins’ this since it’s currently the only browser with automated upgrades (they are handled in the background)."

Also, Internet Explorer’s users only achieved a 60-40 split.

This study still represents good news for developers and users, though.

Let’s just hope the "freshness" data doesn’t take too much of a turn for the worse when Internet Explorer 9 and Firefox 4 are released.

StatCounter data (put into the nice graph you see below by Pingdom) indicates Chrome had a market share of 3.7 percent in September of 2009.  By September of this year, that number had grown to 11.5 percent.

11.5 percent appears to put Chrome well past the point of being some sort of Silicon Valley phenomenon.  Note that the combined market shares of Safari, Opera, and "Other" can’t match it.

Also, Firefox, Safari, Opera, and "Other" weren’t able to achieve similar increases during the period, which means Chrome’s gain can’t be explained away as the simple result of Internet Explorer’s loss.

Of course, the bloggers at Pingdom noted, "When it comes to establishing mindshare, Google has a huge advantage over Mozilla.  They own not just one, but several of the world’s largest web properties, and they have frequently been advertising Chrome on sites like YouTube and the Google Search homepage (Google.com)."

Still, Chrome’s growth is impressive.  The folks at Mozilla may want to look out.

A post on the Royal Pingdom blog stated today, "Twitter processed 2.64 billion tweets this August, an increase of 33% over May.  Not a bad increase over just a summer.  In August, an average of 85 million tweets passed through Twitter every day."

Then the blog post noted, "And if you look at the whole year so far, the increase is even more impressive.  Activity on Twitter has already more than doubled this year (August had 115% more tweets than January)."

That’s quite a lot of growth, as the graph below shows.

It should be interesting to see if Twitter’s rate of growth drops off as everybody returns to the usual grind, setting aside frivolous things.  Or perhaps it’ll pick up as people tell all their friends and coworkers about the fun social network/indispensable tool.

Of course, other factors – like the fail whale or the recurring idea that Facebook might launch a full-scale attack – could also influence the statistics.

Unsurprisingly, the majority of Facebook users live in the social network’s home country, and those 130 million or so individuals work out to about 41.9 percent of the U.S. population.  The U.K.’s 28 million users, meanwhile, represent about 45.1 percent of the people living there.

None of the other percentages are quite as impressive.  France (39.7 percent) and Canada (43.9 percent) are the only countries inhabited by people who are similarly obsessed with Facebook.

Still, looked at another way, that fact means Facebook’s growth won’t be limited by the planet’s population anytime soon.

Pingdom’s blog post tended towards that interpretation of the situation, concluding, "Facebook’s international expansion is well under way, and it’s arguably the largest and most wide-spread social network that ever existed.  As Facebook grows on a global level, the current US dominance of the social network will gradually diminish and become more similar to the general distribution of Internet users."

That will leave Google in a very difficult situation if and when it gets around to launching a rival social network.

The graph below, which was constructed by Pingdom’s bloggers using data from StatCounter, pretty much speaks for itself.  The bars corresponding to the mobile market shares of "Yahoo," "Bing," and "Other" just peek above the x-axis, and would be almost impossible to discern if not for the orange-on-black color scheme.

A post on the Royal Pingdom blog concluded, "If Google firmly believes that mobile is the future (which is the opinion of CEO Eric Schmidt), they are making all the right moves."

Indeed, according to StatCounter’s records, "One year ago, [Google's] share of the mobile search market was 95.58%.  That’s significantly less than today’s 98.29%.  Who knows, in a few months, perhaps they will pass 99%.  At this point this actually seems plausible."

But it should also be interesting to see if the launch of the Windows 7 Phone mobile operating system is able to in any way affect Google’s dominance.  Bing is supposed to be the sole default search option, after all.

Microsoft – and maybe every other company trying to compete in this field – can hope, at least.

Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, and Venezuela stood out as nations in Latin America in which Twitter’s seeing traffic rates quickly increase.  A post on the Royal Pingdom blog also noted, "These are not small countries.  Together, they have almost 150 million Internet users that Twitter can potentially tap into."

Then in Asia, similar patterns are starting to emerge in India, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, and Pingdom’s bloggers put the combined number of Internet users in those countries at 230 million.

Finally, significant increases in Twitter’s popularity have been recorded in Italy, Russia, and Spain, as well, which together account for about 104 million Internet users.

Twitter’s reputation should improve if it can access even a fraction of these individuals (it’ll seem less like a Silicon Valley phenomenon), and international growth should help the site reach many new advertisers, too.

Unfortunately, a larger user base may also result in more appearances on the fail whale’s part (consider how the World Cup’s gone so far for Twitter), but the rising unique visitor stats already imply that most people don’t mind.