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.

Nicholas Carlson, at Business Insider, who as far as I can tell is the original source on this information, claims that Mashable accomplished this by offering solid content, lots of search engine-friendly how-tos, having readers in the social media industry who share everything, and having a dominating Twitter presence. He notes that Mashable is the top shared site on Twitter other than Tweetmeme.

A look at data from both Compete and Quantcast shows that Mashable has surpassed TechCrunch in unique visitors. Here’s Compete’s graph:

Ryan Deal, who often writes for Mashable says, "Mashable has been growing like crazy thanks to twitter popularity, its access to information, and the contributions of a slew of guest writers (like myself)." Besides the Compete and Quantcast data, Deal also points to some Twitter and Alexa numbers:

If you check out the Facebook pages for both TechCrunch and Mashable, you’ll see that Mashable is also winning there in terms of fans – and by quite a large margin at that. Here are TechCrunch’s and Mashable’s numbers respectively:

A quick Twitter search will show an almost overwhelming enthusiasm from Twitterers supporting Mashable’s achievement. It will be interesting to keep an eye on the stats for both blogs. There’s no question that both are incredibly popular, and we’ll have to wait and see if Mashable continues to lead by a wider margin or if the playing field is leveled.

Amazon has been pretty busy this Thanksgiving break, not only are they dealing with the hoards of online shoppers they’re also quietly shutting down one of their web services… Alexa Web Search.

Alexa is already closed for new customers, and current users have until January 26, 2009 to some other service.

It should also be noted that the web search itself isn’t shutting down, only the API for programmers. There has been some confusion over this, as both services share the same name.

A post was made over at the Amazon Web Services Forum with the following message…

We are announcing the deprecation of the Alexa Web Search service as of November 26, 2008. After this date, the Alexa Web Search service will be closed to new subscriptions. The service will continue to be operational for 60 days until February 26, 2009.

Thank you, – The Alexa Web Services Team

Numerous developers have posted their frustrations, as this was a huge surprise to so many. Some have even said they fell they can no longer trust AWS in the future.

A number of people are happy with the changes, of course; some sites have seen huge increases, so they’re more than okay with the way things stand.  But the new rankings make the old ones look ridiculous, and even now, it appears that accuracy is lacking.

 WebProNews On Alexa

Allen Stern writes, "CN dropped from ~25,000 to ~76,000 which is a shocking drop of 51,000 spots.  I actually believe this is a huge mistake and is the highest drop I’ve seen so far.  Yet our sister site, HTMLCenter actually moved up about 30,000 spots and now sits at ~95,000.  The kicker is this: HTMLCenter currently has 15% of the traffic that CN has."

Alexa claims to be drawing information from more sources and using improved methodology.  Whatever it’s doing, though, conversations about the update are often turning into plugs for Compete and Quantcast, which probably wasn’t the company’s goal.

For the record, Alexa currently gives WebProNews a traffic rank of 9,372, and because we haven’t much watched that stat, we have no idea how it compares to our pre-change standing.

Mentions of “Whopper Freakout”

There has already been some talk about this campign on the blogosphere. The following are just a few posts on other blogs:

The Whopper Freakout = Genius

Whopper Viral. Iro?

Whopper Freakout really sells.

Whopper freakout

Death of the Whopper

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Initially set up for the business community to network, share contacts and recommend acquaintances for open job positions, it appears the site has been attempting to expand its scope.

It is a presence on the Internet though, with an Alexa rank of 149 and Google PageRank 7.

Some negative points against it include: Adding Google AdSense ad blocks detracts from its corporate image, as has some discussions in its questions and answers section which seems to have devolved into a discussion of network marketing opportunities and online scams.

Add to that the seemingly limited interaction and communication functions and you might have the receipe for a social network which could be a “killer app” for corporate headhunters, but something that merely stumbles along for the rest of us.

Admittedly, LinkedIn has helped me connect with a couple of university mates, but to squeeze some networking juice out of your profile requires some “out of the box” thinking.

Let’s look at your profile:

The first thing you need to do is to change the hideous: http://www.linkedin/in/473YDSJ3U3 profile URL to something like: http://www.linkedin/in/andrewwee.

If you don’t already have a blog, submitted articles or press releases or have a Squidoo lens or Hubpage up, perhaps this will help you rank for your name.

Be sure to include your profile details, including specializations.

Instead of “content developer” or “writer”, here’s your chance to mention that you’re a “direct response copywriter” or “advertorial writer” or “technical writer”.

Besides making your profile more relevant to human readers, the keywords will help others searching for a specialist to find you more easily too.

So you might list your specialities and perhaps get a job offer direct from an employer. But more likely a headhunter will be farming LinkedIn’s userbase for specific profiles for their database, such as “Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) markeitng specialist”.

Where I think Internet Marketers will benefit more is to find joint venture partners or collaborators who might fill in the missing piece of the puzzle for a project they’re working on.

From the demographics I’ve seen, I’d expect that LinkedIn users would be pretty computer savvy, be technically competent and have a higher education.

To enhance your “findability”, include relevant keywords in your profile so you’ll be more easily found:

Load up on the “groups and associations” and you’ll find others in your community too.

As the profile has pretty limited virtual real estate, you’d probably gain the biggest benefit by adding in your blog and website (and be sure to have a “contact me” link on them).

In the social networking game, I think the adage, it’s not how many people you know, it’s WHO you know, still rings true.

Network long and prosper.

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And that demographic is, typically, other webmasters.

This point has been illustrated several times over the years, but most recently popped up again when YouTube was shown to attract more visitors than parent company Google.

TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington notes that several tipsters have pointed to Alexa as justification:

We’ve gotten a few “tips” that YouTube has actually grown larger than Google in terms of page views according to Alexa .

This is, of course, complete fiction. And it shows just how useless Alexa has become as a method for measuring web traffic and reach.

While Google gets 100 billion (wow!) monthly page views, YouTube is still bringing just 16 billion (still, wow!).

This has happened before, as mentioned earlier, when online hall monitors declared YouTube a defeater of MySpace, and when Matt Cutts noted that his blog was more popular than Ask.com…which seems anymore like a prophecy rather than a blatant fallacy.

But anyway, just be careful with your Alexa proclamations. While an indicator of what’s hip, Alexa numbers are by no means an indicator of the larger truth.

As you can see, not only is Alexa much more inaccurate than others, their accuracy is also going down over time, and currently at just 12% overall.

Note that above statistic uses gut feeling from a selected sample group (me) as data source. I might switch to the Blogoscoped toolbar as data source in the next release, though I haven’t yet decided which is more reliable.

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I’m sad to see ThreadWatch go. As long as I’ve been blogging, it’s been there, and while it was never a place I hung out, it was always worth checking out, usually with some good commentary you didn’t get anywhere else, and more edgy and adult than other sites dared be.

As you can see in the Alexa graph, after Aaron took over ThreadWatch in late 2005, traffic seemed to have increased, but this year has been a particularly bad one for the site. I wonder if that had a lot to do with Aaron’s decision, and if he’d be interested in sharing some site stats now that it’s over.

Hopefully, there’s some exit strategy for ThreadWatch. Certainly, a website with a lot of backlinks and community is worth something, even if just sold off to someone who wants to use it as a link farm. I’d love to see a new owner keep the site as a community, but give it the support to help it grow again. As one farewell comment said:

Another site that dared to be unique gets unplugged.

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So along with the new Google hot trends report and analysing the top peformers within the affiliate programs, what other tools are available? I have put together a list of tools below that can help inspire & provide ideas to help identify trends, potential niches or opportunities that could provide decent traffic and monetisation opportunities for a dedicated blog or site.

Search Engines -

• Google Trends
  
• Google Hot Trends – US only. Replaces the old Google Zeitgeist.
• Yahoo Buzz – The days top 20 overall searches.
• MSN Hotlist – The days top 20 overall searches.
• AOL Hot Searches – Latest top searches with categories.
• Ask Top Searches – Top overall searches and movers.
• Lycos Top 50 – Just that.
• Dogpile – Not great.
• Search.com – Top 1000 searches.
• Metacrawler – Most popular search queries with categories.

Blog Sites -

• Technorati Most Popular – Top searches, blogs and videos.
• Ice Rocket Blog Trends – Top movies & news too.

Shopping Sites / Products -

• Ebay – List of top searches on Ebay.
• Kelkoo – Kelkoos most popular, not great.
• ShopZilla – As above, not great.
• Amazon Bestsellers – Bestsellers by category.
• Amazon Movers N Shakers – Whats hot or not anymore.
• Amazon Hot Future Releases – What should be hot.

News Sites -

• NY Times – Most popular search phrases.
• BBC – Top searches & fastest movers.
• BBC Celebdaq – Highlights hot celebs.
• Wall Street Journal – Most viewed / E-mailed.

Others -

• Alexa Top Sites
• Alexa Movers N Shakers
• Jupiter Research Most Popular – Inc most popular searches.
• Touch Local Popular Searches

Can you add to the list?

Hat tip to the Search Anyway blog, it was about time I spoke a little more about affiliate marketing.

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