Amazon.com’s Alexa Internet Inc. subsidiary company is usually very reliable.  However, there was a temporary outage that caused some concern to many online publications.  Between May 20 and June 3, Alexa was not reporting updated traffic rankings on a daily basis.

Alexa is best known for their toolbar, an add-on to browsers that report a site’s 3 month ranking and harvests data for generating rankings.  On May 23, Alexa updated their toolbar for Firefox 3.0.

Amazon bought Alexa for $250 million in Amazon.com stock in 1999.  Alexa Internet is based in San Francisco, Calif.

The Internet traffic measurement company, Alexa Internet, Inc. has been down for quite some time now.  Today is June 1 and Alexa’s Internet traffic rankings has not updated since May 19.

Normally, Alexa updates daily.  Why isn’t Alexa updating?  There hasn’t been an official announcement, but Allen Stern’s theory is that they might be pulling a Twitter.

There is a sign of life at the company.  I received a notification from the Firefox browser that Alexa launched Sparky version 1.2.1, a plugin that works with Firefox 3.0 in the status bar.

I’m assuming that Alexa’s actual Internet traffic rankings should be working again soon.  This post will be updated when I notice that Alexa starts becoming functional again.

“In recent months we’ve heard from our Alexa users that understanding Internet usage beyond Alexa Toolbar users was increasingly of interest. Ask and you shall receive!” wrote Geoffrey Mack on the Alexa Blog.

Alexa statistics have shifted and the bloggers were some of the first people to react. First thing I noticed was that TechCrunch’s rank felt about 1,000 and it’s ranking is now comparable to LifeHacker.com’s. This seems like an accurate assumption since at one point, TechCrunch was transparent with their hits and LifeHacker still is. Around the time I compared TechCrunch’s hits on SiteMeter vs. LifeHacker’s, I found that TechCrunch’s hits were less than half yet still had a much higher Alexa ranking.

Based on the new ranking that Alexa assigned Pulse 2.0, it seems like a fairly accurate assumption as well. Over the last couple months, Pulse 2.0’s Alexa ranking was falling, but hits were increasing overall. Today, our ranking jumped from 156,000 to 102,000. I think that Alexa is accounting for our overall increase in hits now.

Great job, Alexa team!

Taylor Nelson Sofres, a London, England based market research company has paid $75 million to have Compete.com integrated into their company.  Compete could receive an additional $75 million in earn-outs through 2010 as well [Source: Techcrunch].

Compete.com mines data from 2 million Compete Toolbar users to monitor online behavior.  TNS will use this data for the purpose of providing extra services to their own clients.

Compete.com will remain operating as a stand-alone company.  Compete raised $43 million in capital since 2000 from various venture capital firms including Charles River Ventures, Commonwealth Capital, Chicago Growth Partners, and Split Rock Partners.

Competitors include Alexa, comScore, and Quantcast.  The power of analytics reporting has on Wall Street was recently demonstrated when comScore revealed a slip in Google Ads clicks.  GOOG stock dropped heavily shortly after comScore’s announcement.

Over the past couple weeks, there have been some interesting changes in the Alexa Top 10 Global sites.

Battle of The Searches With A Little Video Website In Between (1-5)
1.) Yahoo! has retained their #1 position.  They have millions of users chatting away on their Messenger software, watching Yahoo! Videos, listening to Yahoo! Music, and playing Yahoo! Games.  For Google or Microsoft to take away their user loyalty, it’ll be tough.  Microsoft seems this as being an issue, hence the $44.6 billion offer.

2.) YouTube is the most surprising of all.  YouTube surpassed Google, its own parent company.  This is an indication that everyone that uses the Internet all over the world is interested in video content now more than ever.  Google acquiring YouTube for $1.7 billion was such a bargain for the search company.  Considering that Yahoo! is worth $44.6 billion and they are one rank higher than YouTube, YouTube must be worth at least $30 billion today.  Video startups, this is your time.

3.) Live.com.  This ranking was inevitable for them since Microsoft switched a majority of their online services under this domain name.  Hotmail is now Mail.Live.com, MSN Messenger is now Windows Live Messenger, Windows Live Spaces is their free blogging platform, etc.

4.) Google dropped by 1.  They are still in the close running against Microsoft and Yahoo!, but YouTube made up for their fall.  Google could easily pass Live.com if they put YouTube under the Google.com domain, but that would just look ugly.  Imagine having a friend sending you an IM that says “Check out this video at http://YouTube.Google.com/watch?v=raGuLfAruNM” instead of “Check out this video at http://youtube.com/watch?v=raGuLfAruNM.”

5.) MSN.com is becoming the personalized arm for Microsoft.  MSN.com, a news portal also includes My.MSN.com, MSN Video.  MSN.com used to be #3, but is losing traction due to its sister-site, Live.com

The Social Networks And The Open Source Encyclopedia (6-10)
6.) MySpace.com is currently the world’s biggest social network and is owned by News Corp.  MySpace was originally an indie site made for musicians to connect with each other and was created by Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe.  MySpace is now being used by News Corp. as real estate for advertisements.  News Corp. is also pushing the MySpace brand in major aired events like the Super Bowl.  During the Super Bowl, it was pointed out that advertisements can be watched on MySpace.com/SuperBowlAds

7.) Facebook is the $15 billion valuated social network that is now an exclusive advertisement partner with Microsoft.   Facebook quickly lifted the mat from under MySpace.  In the last 2 years, Facebook started allowing applications and allowed anyone to register for their site, characteristics that were very MySpace and Friendster-like.  But Facebook has grown rapidly on the Alexa top sites and those are a couple of the reasons.  Will Facebook beat MySpace within the next few months?  Very likely.

8.) Hi5 is one of the biggest social networks in Latin America.  The company has 98 million users and was founded by Ramu Yalamanchi in 2002.   Hi5 recently launched a Chinese version of their site and raised $15 million last month.

9.) Wikipedia is the most well-known use of open-source today.  Content on Wikipedia is all provided by its users.  The company was founded by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger.  By the end of 2007, Wikipedia had 9.25 million articles written in 253 languages.  Not too shabby for a 7 year old online encyclopedia.

10.) Orkut, another Google property founded by Orkut Büyükkökten is another social network. This is also the most visited web site in Brazil.  I bet if you go to an Internet Cafe in Brazil, at least half the people will visit Orkut at least once or twice, just like if you go to any college campus in America, you’ll see Facebook loaded on many of the screens in the libraries.  As a matter of fact, 55% of all Orkut’s traffic is from Brazil and 17% is from India.

The Alexa Blog is located at: http://awis.blogspot.com/.

I just noticed that on my Alexa.com toolbar (owned by Amazon.com), Google’s rank looked a little different.  The web information company’s toolbar was telling me that Google is no longer glazed in bronze.  It had a silver spoon in its mouth.  Oh for crying out loud, If you don’t get my metaphor, what I’m saying is that Google is now ranked #2 and MSN is ranked #3.

Alexa’s Global Top 10:
1.) Yahoo!
2.) Google
3.) MSN
4.) YouTube
5.) Live.com
6.) MySpace
7.) Orkut
8.) Facebook
9.) Wikipedia
10.) Hi5

Looking at the top 10 web sites, Google has the most presence on Alexa.  They are ranked #2 and they own #4 and #7.  Whereas, Microsoft only owns #3 and #5.  Google also has a presence on #6 because they have an exclusive advertising partnership with MySpace.com.  Microsoft counteracted that move by signing an exclusive partnership with #8 website, Facebook.com. It seems like both companies were playing with their domains a little bit over the last year or so.  We saw the rise of Live.com this past year and GMail.com shifted over to the Google.com servers.  Below is a chart comparison from Alexa:

Notice the instant growth of Live.com?  This is perhaps because Hotmail.com shifted over to Live.com servers.  Seeing as how Live.com is constantly growing and MSN.com is slipping a little bit, I’m curious to see what Microsoft will do with MSN to ensure it doesn’t slip more.  And also, what will Yahoo! do to maintain #1.  Over the next couple years, we should see some interesting changes in the Top 10, especially seeing as how it felt like YouTube and Wikipedia came out of nowhere and claimed their current spots.

Website rating system, Alexa.com, a subsidiary company of Amazon.com recently announced that their popular toolbar is now available for Mozilla Firefox. The announcement was made on Monday on the Alexa blog^[1], but I did not notice it until today. The new Firefox Alexa Toolbar is called Sparky.

Below is a screen shot of how it looks when installed. The screen shot was taken from the Sparky download page.

I used to have Smart PageRank Toolbar 1.0, but consider it gone now. Users who have Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.5 should beware that there is a compatibility issue, but one of the comments in the Alexa blog post tells how to bypass the problem.

[1] Alexa - Web Discovery Machine: Sparky Add-on for Firefox Released Today

A press release was sent out stating that Nielsen//NetRatings^[1], a solid source for online page view measurements, will halt monitoring user activity based on page views and will now focus the length of time spent. The official announcement by the company is expected to be made tomorrow. What this means is that because of today’s web technologies, web traffic rating and measurement companies need to start reconsidering the criteria set on determining which web sites are more popular than others.

The biggest example of such technologies is AJAX. AJAX is a technology in which users can take actions on particular websites without having to be redirected to multiple pages. Digg is an excellent example of such technology use. On the homepage of Digg, users can “digg” stories and a vote will be accumulated, all without having to leave www.digg.com:
Also, every story that is submitted on Digg has its own individual page where more AJAX is implemented:

Clicking on the Comments, Who Dugg or Blogged It?, Blog It, and Email It tabs do not require a user to be redirected to another page.

“Based on everything that’s going on with the influx of Ajax and streaming, we feel total minutes is the best gauge for site traffic,” stated Scott Ross, Director of Product Marketing at Nielsen. “We’re changing our stance on how the data should be” used.

AOL LLC and Yahoo! Inc. also benefits from the upcoming changes by Nielsen//NetRatings. Nielsen will credit both services with the time spent on their messenger platforms. About 25 billion minutes was spent AOL Instant Messenger and 20 billion minutes were spent on Yahoo! Messenger service this past May.

Alexa Internet Inc., a subsidiary company of Amazon Inc. is also known for web monitoring that accounts for traffic solely based on users that have the Alexa Toolbar product installed. Will this new initiative by Nielsen pressure Alexa to tweak their tweaking technologies as well? I’m sure we’ll find out soon enough.

References:
[1] nielsen-netratings.com
[2] Alexa: About the Alexa Traffic Rankings
[3] Associated Press: Nielsen scraps Web page view rankings (via Yahoo! News)

Alexa suing Statsaholic isn’t the only recent Alexa-related news to report today. The company announced a couple days ago that their widgets are more configurable.

Geoffrey Mack wrote that some of the newest features include:
- Compare up to 3 sites at a time
- Select from 3 different graph types, Reach Rank, or Pageviews
- Graph sizes are fully configurable, up to 400 W x 300 H
- Graph Ranges are configurable from 1 day to over 5 years
- Background color is configurable.

Every widget will come with a small advertisement powered by BritePic. The blog post by Mack also warns that if you are using Alexa Traffic Graphs without undocumented APIs, then it will be closed within weeks.

The widgets are available at http://www.alexa.com/site/site_stats/signup. I tried embedding the widget but it seems that it is having a hard time being compatible with Wordpress, my blogging tool.