Web Property Trends

Seth Godin posts the Web 2.0 Alexa watch list by ranking a few weeks ago. Some are more known and immediately recognized than others, i.e., YouTube, MySpace and Orkut were at the top in late December, whereas LinkedIn was #18, a more widely used site in Silicon Valley, at least in my circles.

So, what's really going on with web properties based on these traffic patterns?

Friendster remained unchanged as did Digg and MySpace. FaceBook was up by two, FeedBurner by 3, Skype by 1, and flickr by 1.

Interestingly enough, some of the major blogs and top blog properties showed a decline, such as NetVibes which went from 3,000 to 2,000. Other well known sites went down more significantly, such as YouSendIt (by 8 - not surprising, see my earlier blog post on vendors who try to own you.

Well known players LiveJournal, eBay and LinkedIn went down by 1, CafePress by 3 and Kayak by 9, yet client eSnips, who is less known to the world at large, increased by 25%. I consider it more of the 'real social sharing site' for grown-ups, where you can share any data type and sell it directly inside your own tagged community.

At #48 in the chart (and 1,337) a few weeks ago, eSnips has moved to 745 in just a few short weeks. It continues to climb and in under a year, already has 1.3 million registered users and 5 million visitors.

Alexa is tricky however since it is hard to always tell what drives traffic at a particular time versus another given time. Having said that, it remains a fairly good indicator of where people spend their time.