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.

Ron Hornbaker created Alexaholic for the purpose of getting faster and flexible access data and traffic charts. Although the logos for Alexa and Alexaholic are strikingly similar, they are not affiliated with each other.

Alexaholic is dubbed as “Website traffic comparisons on steroids.” Chart comparison load times are very fast. Alexaholic is definetely a step-up from the original Alexa.com because it offers more chart producing options such as comparing a range of time from 7 days to 5 years and allows you to compare 5 domains. Alexaholic allows users to embed generated charts on their website by providing the HTML code as well.

This is an example of one of the more classic Alexaholic “mash-up” comparisons:

Its interesting how craigslist and friendster leveled off, but Orkut, MySpace, and Blogger have been growing intensely.

Another Alexa-related Web 2.0 application that was released earlier this year is Alexa Street. Although Alexaholic became viral a lot quicker, both of these concepts are unique and make using Alexa more fun.