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Did you link to the original article?
So, growth is nice, of course, but not sufficient for survival. See the banking system. It sure grew like hell, but all that growth wasn't sustainable. The same happens to a startup that grows in users, but not in income.
For survival, generating enough income and a having a sufficiently high liquidity are mandatory. Growth isn't. There are companies generating more revenue with some dozen valuable accounts than certain startups with hundered thousands of users that don't yield a penny.
See Facebook: They grow, but still have no clue how to monetize (and whether users would appreciate being milked). So far, they're not even able to earn enough to have something left after bills were paid.
In my view, Facebook is one big fail story. The masses just have not realized it yet. Potential buyers will realise it soon and certainly not buy before there's evidence of a profitable business for Facebook. Same goes for Twitter or Friendfeed or 97% of all startups that follow the Freemium business model.
BTW, I am biased, but FRIENDFEED rocks the internet hands down. :)
You and Louis both know that!!!
Social Median is my #2 favorite new app...very impressive app and more impressive is Jason Goldberg, the genious "energizer bunny" that never quits...amazing guy there!
Cheers!
http://friendfeed.com/susanbeebe
http://twitter.com/susanbeebe
kirtsy.com is still growing (albeit it dipped in july - it's on the rebound)
alltop.com slowed down but still growing (seriously - you invoke guy kawasaki and leave alltop off the list?)
twine.com seems to have gone off the charts in the past couple of months, but it technically was around before this year
soup.io similar situation to twine.com - suspect the impending demise of pownce is responsible for that.
All in all tho, I like both your list & Louis's - but I'm still not a friendfeed fanatic.
As per my favorites: Nothing much new except Friendfeed this year. Just hopped onto Zenbe and liking it till now. Also, used SocialBrowse for quite sometime but it's usage dipped when I switched to Google Chrome.
I would like to add a couple of things regarding feedly:
1) Our current focus is not absolute growth but how many of the people who get to try feedly keep using it daily and tell their friends about it on Twitter. On those metrics we have been making steady progress *every week* since we opened feedly to the public in June. see [1].
2) Technically, feedly is designed so the mash-up of the data it is aggregating is happening in real-time in the browser. So the traffic you are pointing to does NOT reflect feedly usage but simply people who visit the feedly corporate website.
It has been an interesting problem to try to solve. We are not there yet but I believe that if we continue to listen to users[2] and make progress every week, 2009 will be an interesting year for feedly.
[1] http://search.twitter.com/search?q=feedly
[2] http://www.getsatisfaction.com/feedly
http://siteanalytics.compete.com/friendfeed.com...
The above URL shows a similar graph, but 4 times higher than the URL you cited.
A couple of notes on Gnip, first, the web site URL you are using on Compete.com is incorrect (as Louis points out as well). Our web site URL is http://www.gnipcentral.com which is probably why you are seeing a flat line in web site traffic.
Second, our product offering is not a web-based destination, it is an API based service that facilitates data portability so that developers can create applications on any platform they choose. I'm not even sure using a comparator like compete.com is appropriate for us in this case.
What you are likely going to see are services that you know and love using Gnip under the covers, whether that fact is transparent or not, it will certainly make measuring our popularity under these standards a bit more difficult. I'm pretty excited about what we've got going on, and even more excited about some of the ways developers are using our service to create feature-rich applications.
Cheers!
Please keep in mind, we're not a consumer service. We don't help you keep track of your posts, or other people's posts or enable you to post elsewhere. We package and deliver data from services like Digg, Delicious, Twitter and Six Apart to services like Plaxo, MyBlogLog, Strands and EventVue. Our work is behind the scenes and as a result just looking at our traffic isn't the best way to take our pulse.
Have a happy holiday and let's all hope 2009 is better than 2008.
Cheers!
Eric
Feedly is also a good one because of their product and good interface, although the growth was not so powerful.
And then in your analysis, you say absolutely nothing about which services are "the best" or even (with the exception of FriendFeed) you like... No, you just constantly harp on, Did they grow quickly?
Those are two entirely different questions. So much so, it's almost a bait and switch.
The post could probably have made sense if you'd gone on to say, "Look at all these services that people like and admire -- and aren't growing. Shows yet again how quality isn't the main driver in this business!" But, no, there's not even that much self-awareness.
There's all this comparison to Louis Gray when there's no indication the respondents know or care who Louis Gray is, and -- again -- has nothing to do with the question as asked.
I'm not saying there may be interest in the points you raise. But the way you've presented them, it's almost like you lose interest in the answer to any given question before you even finish asking it and then move on, when the people who answered the question you asked in the first place have no idea you're already bored with the question they answered -- and you're now using their answers in a context they had no way of knowing would exist by the time you posted them.
good points. Of those on the list, the ones I like and use often are here:
1. FriendFeed.
4. TweetDeck.
5. Disqus.
7. Qik.
8. Evernote.
9. TripIt.
So, six out of 11. But I think the other four are good, too, and will start using them. One thing I've learned about watching crowds of early adopters. They usually are right.