Social Site Rankings (September, 2007)

Via techcrunch.com: "Did you know that Imeem is the fastest-growing social site in the U.S (up 1,590 percent in monthly uniques). And that AIM Pages is growing slightly faster than Digg (345 percent growth versus 323 percent)?"



Read the full techcrunch article and see more nifty data tables...

Alexa Launches Official "Sparky" Firefox Toolbar

Alexa - Alexa Toolbar: "Sparky is a free FireFox browser plugin that accompanies you as you surf, providing useful information about the sites you visit without interrupting your Web browsing."



There have been a number of unofficial toolbars, but here's the real deal for those who like to reference Alexa data when reviewing websites.

New Google Analytics Facing Problems?

mashable.com: "From Tuesday to Wednesday, Analytics stopped gathering data for almost a full day, before returning sometime on Wednesday afternoon with the data intact..."

I'll be keeping an eye on this. If you are a client of J.Y. Design and experiencing any issues with your Google Analytics account, please get in touch.

Competitious: New product in the works

Competitious.com: "Competitious is an early beta release of a much more robust service we’ve been planning here at RivalSoft... The service will be a comprehensive web-based platform that helps companies manage and analyze all information about their competitors, and will incorporate almost all of the suggestions and feedback we've received on Competitious. The new service will also have a new name (which we are keeping under wraps for now). All of your data from Competitious will be migrated when our new service launches. We are aiming to launch the new service in 2-3 months..."

Competitious is a great service even in its current form. It's a handy way to organize a group of related Companies / URLs and attach articles to them, create a comparison matrix for them, and also monitor Alexa traffic. You can create multiple "projects" which makes it handy for doing different competitive scenarios. I've even used it as a quick research tool when looking into topics or new market trends.

Google Analytics launches new reporting interface design

The new UI looks nice. Here are some highlights: It takes advantage of full browser width; it has a customizable dashboard; larger cleaner graphs; and the ability to email and export reports. I'm looking forward to digging deeper into this upgrade.

UPDATE: mashable.com has just posted a very in-depth look at the new UI complete with many screen shots.

A Web Analytics Breakthrough (That May Never Be Used)

A Web Analytics Breakthrough (That May Never Be Used): "If you're one of the burgeoning number of Firefox users, you probably also use a number of the many extensions available to stretch, modify, personalize, and customize the browser's capabilities. If Google Browser Sync is one of those extensions, have you considered the implications it might have for Web analytics and ad tracking?"

This is an interesting article. It is a good reminder that the move toward centralizing ones online identity can be tied to the browser as well - not just the pages it's rendering.