I was recently contacted by Gary Roberts, a 21 year old software engineer from New Zealand who created Tall Street with Robert Mena.  Tall Street is a ‘Social Recommendation Engine’ where users vote for websites based on several categories.

The categories are: Web, Video, Music, Image, Book, News, Blog, Group, Shopping, Software, and Podcast.  Any visitors can vote for websites, even if they reload the website without even needing to register.

If you do create an account, you are allotted 50 cents in your account.  With that 50 cents, you can invest into any website.  Users can add a link, invest in other websites, and maintain investments within a portfolio:

This idea reminds me of another company that I had reviewed before:

Alexa Street was offline for quite some time, but resurfaced recently.  The advantage that Alexa Street has over Tall Street it is designed better to simulate stock trading where share value emulates change in Alexa rankings.  Tall Street allows anyone to vote for a site.  The advantage that Tall Street has is that it is not dependent on a third party to run.  Statsaholic (the website formely known as Alexaholic) ran into several problems because of that.

Two days ago, I wrote about how Amazon/Alexa is blocking Statsaholic from using their API.  Today I’ll report the other side of the story: Alexa’s side.

Alexa says that using the name Alexa is not tolerable in any circumstances, so it had a problem with the name Alexaholic.  “We reached out to Mr. Hornbaker [founder of Alexaholic] last year in an attempt to resolve the problem amicably. We even explored an acquisition, which we didn’t have to do,” writes Geoffrey Mack, an Alexa representative on his blog.  “Unfortunately, it became clear over time that Mr. Hornbaker did not want to stop trading off the Alexa name. This left Alexa with no alternative but to bring legal action to recover the misappropriated name.”

Hornbaker then was legally forced to change the name Alexaholic.  Hornbaker chose the name Statsaholic, but was still using the Alexaholic domain to transfer traffic to Statsaholic.  Mack also wrote “Mr. Hornbaker is in fact not using our web service to generate the traffic graphs on his website. Instead of obtaining the traffic data for a fee using the API which Alexa offers, he has chosen to pirate proprietary Alexa data by taking Alexa traffic graphs without permission.  Mr. Hornbaker is now trying to extract more value from Alexa by turning this into a PR issue, which he admits is a deliberate strategy.”

Alexa stated that they will be pursuing this issue aggressively and make sure that they are compensated for any losses.  In this case, I’d say that Alexa has a stronger argument especially because of the piracy involved.

I first wrote about Alexaholic on October 7, 2007, before Alexa revamped its website to run faster and provide more traffic comparison options.  It looks like that on March 18, Alexa took legal action against Ron Hornbaker about use of the name, Alexaholic.  So the website came back online as the name, Statsaholic.  Now it appears that Alexa is blocking the Statsaholic’s use of the API altogether.

“While blocking the hotlinking of their images is certainly within their right, in this case they are selectively blocking just this website, because tens of thousands of other websites, and Alexa’s own free widgets, hotlink their traffic graphs in exactly the same manner as I’m doing. Just so Alexa knows, I would gladly pay a reasonable fee to serve their graph images here, but to date they have no official api for those images,” wrote Hornbaker on the Statsaholic pages.  Hornbaker is currently looking to ways to keep the website up around the system, but is having a hard time getting around the API.

Before Alexa had blocked Statsaholic from using the API, visitors of the Statsaholic could embed graphs with Alexa data on their own websites.  I don’t believe that this feature has yet been introduced by Alexa yet, so the company may have felt threatened that Statsaholic was using their data without receiving any compensation.  However, looking at the previous statement by Hornbaker, it seems that he is prepared to offer some sort of compensation for continuous use of the data.  Whether it will pan out or not is still a mystery, but we’re rooting for Hornbaker as I see Statsaholic being a website that utilizes the API quite well.

Another questionable website that went down which I covered before that had the name Alexa in it was Alexa Street which also utilized the Alexa API.  Alexa Street was a game where you can buy and sell “shares” of website rankings based on Alexa data.  If a website’s Alexa ranking dropped, but was expected to rise shortly after, you clearly wanted to buy those shares and sell them again when it reaches the high point.  I am not sure whether Alexa took legal action against Alexa Street though.

If you look at Alexa’s current Movers & Shakers for this week, it appears that Alexaholic is one of the Movers & Shakers that dropped in rankings the most.  I think that this should be removed seeing as how Alexa is responsible for the drop.

I do not like MySpace compared to other social networks which is why I am glad to report that Alexa has confirmed that YouTube has a bigger rank and daily reach count than MySpace. This will probably irritate News Corporation’s Rupert Murdoch even more since he has reportedly accused YouTube’s growth relying heavily on MySpace.

Google has a piece of the pie from both YouTube and MySpace. Google paid $900 million to power MySpace search. And YouTube Inc. became property of Google Inc. for $1.6 billion this past year.

[Source: Smaran Dayal]

I believe that as websites that were created to improve the Alexa.com service were introduced such as Alexaholic.com, Alexa realized that they had to stay ahead with the times and has totally revamped their chart system so that you can now compare 5 websites at a time, compare rank and page views and reach without having to leave the current page, and now the charts on Alexa.com are AJAX-driven. Here is a screenshot:

Here is a comparison between TechCrunch and SantaBanta, two websites with a close ranking. For all the comparison and settings that you initiate, Permalinks are created. So for example, I’m comparing the Rank, set the image as Large, kept the default smoothing at Level 3, and have the range set at 6 months and here is the Permalink for those settings.

On the Alexa homepage, there is a module called Web Discovery which links to the Blogger account of the Alexa team. The latest post was by Geoffrey Mack stated:
“I was just playing with some of the new ajaxy buttons and sliders our traffic graphs and ran across something that raised an eyebrow. Check out this YouTube graph…”

“It started going flat on October 9th. Anybody care to guess what happened on that date?” stated Mack.

Given that Geoffrey Mack was able to compare the drop in Reach with the Google/YouTube acquisition announcement, I think a great addition to Alexa’s charts would be if they could somehow associate the spikes and drops with news associated with their top 100,000 websites similar to Google Finance:

Notice how I selected A in the chart and it correlates with the news article to the right of the above screenshot. That would be phenomenal if Alexa could pull-off a similar feature so top 100,000 website owners could see what to improve on.

For anyone who may have noticed a difference in their Alexa toolbar, this is explained why on the Alexa homepage, announced by Geoffrey Mack. “Today we pushed out an update to the Alexa Toolbar to ensure compatibility with IE7. Your toolbar should auto-update within the next day or so. If you can’t wait, you can go ahead and download it here” stated Mack yesterday. “As always, for Firefox die-hards, I recommend the Search Status Toolbar, which was built with a custom Alexa toolbar API that we make available to toolbar developers.”

The purpose of the new toolbar is “to ensure compatibility with IE7″ according to the Alexa team’s blog. Another humorous post placed in the Alexa blog and on their homepage by the Alexa team is the comparison between Zefrank.com and Rocketboom.com as a promotion for the Alexa site widgets:

For background on why this would be humorous, refer to this [webpronews article]

I read this very interesting article on Read/Write Web about how Compete.com will be taking on Alexa in the web analytics market.  Compete has recently opened up a new search engine and web analytics tools for its users.  Compete used to provide web analytics privately.

The name of the web analytics software is called SnapShot and it collects data using a toolbar, ISPs, Opt-in Panels, and other Application Providers.  Alexa just uses its toolbar to collect visitor information and assign rankings.  Read/Write Web states, “As with Alexa, there is ranking, pages/visit, avg stay and comparisons (up to 3 domains in total). There’s also a People metric - an estimate of unique visitors to a site.”

Some of the limitations that Read/Write Web has listed is that the rankings are only U.S. based for Compete.com thus leading to inaccuracy and that Compete does not cater to blogs and other small websites.  Read/Write Web tested their own website along with TechCrunch and found that the estimations were defective.

Compete.com was created by Bill Gross in 2000.  Bill Gross is known for his involvement in goto.com and overture.com.

Alexa.com, an Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN) subsidiary company, has released a new toolbar. What is Alexa? Alexa is best known for collecting data from Alexa toolbars and then assigning traffic rankings based on how many people with Alexa toolbars visit the websites that are indexed on the Alexa database.

Alexa features a Top 500 and Movers & Shakers section on their website as well. Movers & Shakers indicates which websites in the Top 100,000 has dropped or grown substantially in rankings. The top 3 websites in Alexa are search engine giants Yahoo!, MSN, and Google. Yahoo! has been remaining #1 for years now whereas MSN.com and Google.com are fighting on and off for #2.

Alexa rankings have such a profound effect on how much credibility a website has because many venture capitalists determine whether to give funding to certain website businesses based on their rankings. It has been a long time since Alexa has released a new toolbar, but now I will highlight the features of the new toolbar:

One of the most notable differences is that there is an arrow next to the ranking indicating whether websites has grown or fallen in rankings. A green up arrow means that the site ranking has gone up and a red arrow pointing down means that the ranking has fallen. Another difference is that the toolbar also shows users what rank a website has grown from or has fallen from directly on the toolbar so users don’t necessarily have to visit the website to find out.

The other features that are currently on the new toolbar are the same as the last version such as the pop-up blocker, the website search button, the info pull-down menu, and the pull-down menu for seeing who owns the website that you are visiting, but the new design is a lot more sleek. Currently the Alexa toolbar is not available for Firefox.

Alexa Internet is based in San Francisco, CA. Alexa Internet was started in 1996 by Brewster Kahle and Bruce Gilliat. Etoile Investments had backed Alexa with funding at the time. Alexa Internet was a commercial offshoot for Internet Archive, a website that stores the history of a website’s design even before the 2000s. In 1999, Amazon acquired Alexa for $250 million in Amazon stock.

There are a couple websites that we have reviewed in the past that has used the Alexa ranking system to create Web 2.0 applications. The fastest growing application is [Alexaholic]. Another web application that uses Alexa rankings mocks the stock market by allowing users to buy and sell website shares for free which is called [Alexa Street].