The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘compete’

Web analytics firm Compete has released its data for the month of May, and as Justin Smith over at InsideFacebook has already pointed out, US traffic to Facebook.com has increased by nearly 8% to 82.9 million unique visitors last month, with Facebook Connect sites generating an additional 65 million uniques. That means that, according to Compete, a total of 113 million people in the U.S. interacted with the Facebook service. The data also shows MySpace is (still) steadily decreasing compared to the beginning of the year, while Twitter growth seems to have flattened all of the sudden.

While it is interesting to see how the hot social networks stack up in terms of traffic, I thought I’d also take a look at how well Facebook is doing compared to other Web giants like Google.com, Yahoo.com and MSN.com. To my surprise, Facebook appears to have become a real challenger to these Internet juggernauts, who are relatively old compared to the social network that started out in 2004 as a university student-only service and only really opened up to the public in September 2006.

Evidently. this is only one way to look at things. First, Compete does not always provide spot-on traffic estimates (data from comScore suggested Facebook had yet to surpass MySpace in US traffic back in March) and second it’s hardly fair to compare these websites as they all serve different purposes and audiences. But the picture painted here is that Facebook has unmistakingly grown up to become one of the most popular Internet destinations on the planet, both in terms of registered users (well beyond 200 million at this point) and in terms of received traffic. And we’re still talking about a privately-held (albeit massively funded) company that has come this far. No wonder its valuation is surging.

Then there’s our model of the true value of social networks, which gave Facebook a clear lead as well.

For comparison, Compete pegs Google to have received a total of 145.5 million unique visitors in May, ahead of Yahoo (135.5 million) and MSN.com (97.5 million), which means Facebook has already overtaken the MSN website and is nearing the former two. It’s important to note that all four sites show a significant increase in U.S. traffic since the beginning of this year, but Facebook is definitely on the steepest growth curve here. In January 2009, total traffic to Facebook was somewhere around 68.5 million uniques, which means the May number of 113 million represents a 61% jump, mostly thanks to the successful spread of the Facebook Connect service.

If these trends persist, expect Facebook to come out on top of the Compete charts well before the year ends.

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It turns out that people are following more than just their friends online. Look at the comScore chart above comparing unique visitors in the U.S. to FriendFeed versus Twine. Yeah, I was shocked to see that Twine has more than three times as many unique monthly visitors as FriendFeed (714,000 vs. 188,000). On a worldwide basis, comScore shows FriendFeed still slightly ahead of Twine. ComScore doesn’t always do a great job with small sites, so I checked Compete, which shows Twine with 2.25 million monthly visitors in April versus 998,000 for FriendFeed (see embed below). Different numbers, same story.

While FriendFeed is organized around following feeds of your friends’ activities across the Web, Twine is organized around interest feeds. Essentially, Twine members create topic pages that others can follow. It requires more work than FriendFeed. You have to add items such as links,articles, videos, and notes. But once you do, Twine organizes them for you using an underlying semantic index and tagging technology combined with social inputs from the community. So in a sense it competes more with Mahalo or Squidoo in that it creates authoritative pages around topics, except that these pages are really constantly updated topic or interest feeds that anyone can add to. You can read more about the original concept here, which relaunched publicly in October, 2008. All the growth is from October.

I pinged Nova Spivack, CEO of Radar Networks, the company behind Twine, to ask what’s up. He says that both the Compete and comScore numbers are off, but the trend is right. The initial growth came simply from letting people in who had been on the waiting list. But even he is surprised by the growth rate. So far five million items have been bookmarked in Twine. There are now 200,000 registered users who have created Twines (its name for interest feeds) across 30,000 different interest groups. The rest of the traffic comes from people visiting those topic pages.

And it is not all SEO traffic. Spivack provides the following breakdown of traffic by source: 59 percent comes from people coming directly to Twine, 20 percent comes from search engines, and most of the rest comes from people who receive email notifications and daily digests tracking the interest feeds they’ve signed up for. About 2 percent of traffic comes from twitter, but that portion is “rising fast.”

Following interesting people is just a proxy for following your interests, and Twine lets you connect with like-minded people as well. It is the combination that is killer.

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We haven’t actually seen the details of it since a first look was given exclusively to the New York Times instead of us, but there’s a new Compete report coming out supposedly later today that claims only 27% of iPhone owners use their device for work-related needs compared to 59% of owners with other types of smartphones (HTC, Blackberry, Nokia, etc.).

The NY Times reporter didn’t detail where these stats are coming from and how Compete reached their conclusions exactly apart from saying ’smartphone users were surveyed’, but I consider the article’s headline (”Apple iPhone Owners Don’t Use It For Work”) to be quite misleading either way you spin it.

Having an iPhone myself, I can imagine that a lot of people are indeed using their Apple phones for personal reasons like entertainment (games, videos, etc.) a lot more than they do with other smartphones, but that is because the user experience on the latter devices generally sucks compared to the iPhone anyway. There’s a whole lot of well-known reasons for that: either developers don’t find the respective platforms compelling enough to create applications for, either they do but the quality bar is set too low, and even then there’s no decent, central marketplace to download or buy apps from. But let’s not digress from the main talking point.

The Compete survey reportedly found that 73% of iPhone owners used their mobile devices primarily for personal reasons, but what isn’t detailed is how much time in total they are using their phones - which I imagine is a whole lot more than on other smartphones - and how much more efficient it makes them when they actually do use it for work.

For reference, a recent AdMobs Mobile Metrics report pointed out that nearly 50% of all smartphone web traffic in the U.S. comes from iPhone devices. I’d also like to point to a recent study by JD Power and Associates which ranked iPhone highest in customer satisfaction, not for everyday consumers (those the device was initially targeted at, I might add), but for “business wireless smartphone users.”

I’d also argue that the time I spend using my iPhone for professional reasons may be much less than I used to spend battling the Windows Mobile OS on my previous smartphone (an HTC), but that it increased my productivity when I’m on the go five-fold easily, and isn’t that what really matters?

This tidbit from the article bothered me as well:

The firm found that getting local forecasts, turn-by-turn directions and nearby restaurant recommendations were the most popular location-aware iPhone applications.

Undoubtedly true, but which mobile worker hasn’t at one point used his smartphone for directions or restaurant recommendations directly related to his or her job? How can Compete possibly claim these services are being used for personal use only?

Let’s call it like it is: while not perfect, the iPhone is a joy to use from an individual standpoint, whether it’s for business or personal reasons, and all the other device manufacterers are (or should be) playing catch-up when it comes to physical design, UI and general ease-of-use of navigation.

I use my phone a whole lot more than I used to in the past, and even I would answer a survey question asking for my behavior that I use it primarily for personal reasons, but does that in any way imply that I don’t use it for work?

The answer is a big fat no, quite the contrary, thank you.

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Zoho, the creators of a web-based software suite made up of document, project and invoicing management tools, has launched the availability of its comprehensive webtop productivity products on mobile devices.

Zoho previously had basic mobile support for its applications on iPhone and some limited capability on Windows Mobile but now fully integrates Zoho Applications with several mobile devices. Zoho Mail, Calendar, Writer, Sheet, Show & Creator are now available for the iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, WindowsMobile and Symbian devices.

As we’ve written in the past, Zoho is an innovative document management tool, and includes easy access thanks to support for Google and Yahoo IDs and the group sharing across different apps feature. While Zoho has added useful features to its software suite, Zoho is going to have to fight an uphill battle to keep consumers from going towards web-based applications offered by companies with a vast reach (Google, Microsoft, Adobe, etc.).

Here’s a slideshow on Zoho’s mobile integration:

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Mint, the popular personal finance site that won 2007’s TechCrunch40, is launching a new feature called “Financial Fitness” which, strange as it may sound, adds an element of gaming to the service. Yes, it may sound like a bizarre combination at first - personal finance and fun aren’t exactly two things that go hand in hand. But it’s also a smart move on Mint’s part, as it looks to turn a mundane activity into something a bit more tolerable while increase Mint’s engagement in the process. Mint is running the new feature in a private beta for a few weeks, and the first 500 TechCrunch readers to Email techcrunch-getfit@mint.com with the Email address they use on Mint.com will gain access.

The game itself is fairly simple. It outlines five main principles that users should focus on on the road to financial fitness, including ’spend less than you earn’, ‘manage credit and debt wisely’, and so on. Each of these core principles has a number of tasks associated with it, like ‘Avoid Bank Fees’ and ‘Come in under budget’. As you complete tasks, you are rewarded with points. And over time, you can earn merit badges for completing more difficult tasks, like being named as a “Financial Guru” for maintaining a 100% health status for an extended period of time.

Mint has studied the reward systems of games including Wii Fit, Warcraft, and Nike Fit as they built the game, looking to turn their virtual financial advisor into something a little more interesting than a wall of text. Of course, solving each of these tasks often involves the user interacting with a Mint feature or a referral to a partner site, which means Mint can effectively monetize the game as well.

I’m sure many people will initially react to the game with skepticism, as it isn’t exactly the first thing you’d expect at a finance site. But seemingly pointless gaming elements can be useful nonetheless: one need only take a look at foursquare, a fairly new application that is quite addictive because of its game-like nature. That said, these kind of point systems tend to work best when there is some kind of social element involved - be it through a rivalry with friends or an aggregated leader board. As a financial site Mint doesn’t seem well suited for this kind of competition (it would be a bit strange to make fun of my friends for having a poorer financial health than me), but I think the gaming aspect should work nonetheless.

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I know, you’re sick of Twitter data. But more keeps rolling in showcasing just how massive last week was for Twitter. The Kutcher/CNN race to a million on top of Oprah showcasing the service on Friday, likely was the biggest week ever for the service. And here’s some data to back that up.

The week before the Kutcher/CNN race, Kutcher’s Twitter page got about 176,000 pageviews, according to numbers provided to us by Compete. Last week, his pageviews rose to an incredible 3.2 million — yes, that is just for his Twitter profile page. In the same time span, CNNbrk (the account racing Kutcher) went from 61,000 pageviews to over 900,000. And Oprah, the latecomer, went from 5,000 pageviews (before she ran the account), to over 980,000 — which is perhaps even more incredible considering she made her debut on Friday of last week.

Now, Compete’s numbers are sometimes quite a bit off, but the trends are the key here. Overall Twitter.com traffic went from 367 million to over 420 million for the week in terms of pageviews. Meanwhile, unique views went from just over 8 million, to over 10 million. The pageviews on Twitter’s signup page alone went up over by over a million for the week.

These celebrities are having an amazing effect on Twitter’s growth. We crunched some numbers earlier today suggesting that perhaps over a million users signed up for Twitter following Oprah’s show.

“Twitter is poised to explode once again this month and will likely finish up over 30 million UVs for this month. If that happens they will double their March numbers and jump from #72 in our ranking into the Top 20,” according to a Compete analyst. That comes just a month after it already more than doubled its unique views (at least in the US) last month.

Wow. And remember, this data is only for Twitter’s website, it doesn’t include any of the usage from third-party sites/services (thanks, Max). Find the full web traffic chart below.

Update: The original signup pageview numbers Compete sent over were off, the updated chart is below.

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