Viktors Rotanovs » Trends 2.0

Alexa.com Goes Wild in India

viktors — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 10:20:14 +0000

Spotted a weird Alexa bug this morning – Indian top sites page appears to be messed up – both Indian and non-Indian top sites are mixed together:

Top Indian Sites

French, UK and Russian websites, top rated in India

See Indian top sites for yourself. How can be 1 million top sites trustworthy if company makes mistakes like this?

Check my Fastest-Growing sites in India if you’re interested what Indian web-o-sphere is all about.

Google AdSense is Down

viktors — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 20:43:38 +0000

It looks like not guaranteeing 100% uptime is becoming a trend:

Microsoft Photosynth was inaccessible for several hours after official launch.
Twitter’s downtime has become a story by itself. Many people think that’s because they use Ruby on Rails.
Draugiem.lv, Latvia’s largest social network, had constant uptime problems during first years of operation. By the way, it’s PHP-based.
One.lv, another popular social network in Latvia, is down for several minutes every night. It’s written in Java/GWT.

And now I see something from a website which is supposed to be always up. After 1 second delay at log in, Google AdSense displays this message:

http://www.google.com/errors/asfe/system_down.html

UPDATE Aug 24 2008: The service is up now. Instead of using traditional practice of showing maintenance times on out of service page, Google posted this on their blog:

This Saturday, August 23rd, our engineers will be performing site maintenance from 10am to 2pm PDT. You’ll be unable to log in during these hours, but we’ll continue to track your earnings and serve ads to your pages. For those of you located in different time zones, we’ve provided the maintenance start time for a few international cities:

London – 6pm Saturday
Istanbul – 8pm Saturday
Bangalore – 10:30pm Saturday
Hanoi – 12am Sunday
Auckland – 5am Sunday

Finally, you may have noticed that we’re posting this message a little earlier than usual. Based on your feedback, we’ll do our best to post these maintenance reminders earlier in the week to help you plan ahead. Thanks for the suggestion!

Rising Web Sites 2008 – HitGeist.com Relaunch

viktors — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 03:40:28 +0000

Today I’ve relaunched HitGeist.com, with fresh data from Alexa and much improved algorithm. Visitor popularity trends have been not what TechCrunch usually writes about – there are many overseen websites which grow at astonishing rates. Many new companies emerge from around the world, for example, Russian vkontakte.ruis about to become #2 by daily unique visitors at local market, and Scandinavian countries have their own set of traffic-rich national players.

While sudden traffic surges are interesting, new HitGeist focuses on discovering websites which have shown steady growth, and assumes that when traffic is unstable, website is more likely to use non-natural means to attract traffic, such as advertising, PPC campaigns, spam, or spyware.

There are still some bugs to fix, but new stats were so breathtaking that I decided to share them as soon as possible.

Russian Facebook Copycat Becomes #3 in Russia in less than a year

viktors — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 02:24:20 +0000

Something strange is happening in Russia. For several years, social networking didn’t really pick up, although many have tried, and about one year ago new Russian Facebook clone appeared, and became #3 now.

The site itself doesn’t look special – design is almost except copy of digg at time vkontakte.ru was created:

All features are standard: friends, photos, videos, messages, notes (blog), groups, and events. There is support for Russian declinations, including gender-specific inflection with support for names, which is quite difficult to implement, for example: Друзья Наталии Искорки (Friends of Nataly Iskorka).

Former soviet republics are recognized, so perhaps website may become popular among Russian-speaking audience in Baltics or Central Asia, and 5.9% of its users already come from Ukraine.

Website owner is Pavel Durov, with user’s id of 1. I’m wondering who’s got id of zero.

To view pages of other users, you have to fill your profile to at least 30%. Perhaps that’s a contributing factor to site’s growth, in addition to quite good picture filtering – you won’t find Olsen Twins photos in profiles here, at least not at first sight. Updating profile photo may be not super-easy for users who got high-megapixel camera or don’t know the difference between BMP and JPG – upload is limited to 5 MB.

I’ve heard rumors that the site grew so quickly because creators took their hands on database of students, which is not impossible given current situation with intellectual property protection in Russia.

Many other Russian Web 2.0 sites copy ideas as well, just check the list at Hitgeist: Trends in Russia. In particular, RuTube, Odnoklassniki.ru and Smotri.com are worth mentioning.

HITgeist – realzeit stats (gainers & losers by country)

viktors — Sun, 08 Apr 2007 20:44:20 +0000

After being noted as an interesting project by Web 2.0 entrepreneurs and SEO specialists for several months, AlexaRadar becomes HITgeist today. New name demonstrates focus on international coverage and its European origin, as well as allows to show data from multiple providers of statistics.

ProgrammableWeb chooses AlexaRadar as a 5-star mashup of the day

viktors — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 11:15:20 +0000

Yesterday I submitted AlexaRadar to ProgrammableWeb.com, a largest collection of mashups that currently exists, and – surprise! – today AlexaRadar is not only a mashup of the day, but it also received 5-star rating from users of ProgrammableWeb.com. Thanks everyone who rated the website!

For those who aren’t into mashups yet, ProgrammableWeb.com provides absolutely unique Web 2.0 Mashup Matrix – it definitely deserves a look.

Alexa Radar – find successful websites around the world

viktors — Sat, 30 Sep 2006 13:35:58 +0000

I needed some real project to try Ruby on Rails, so here’s Alexa graph analyzer with some additional analytic features. It’s not finished yet, but already useful for finding what websites show steady growth in all countries supported by Alexa. Check out what’s popular in Estonia, what do they grow in Netherlands, and what do they eat in South Korea.

Best Ajax Example Out There

viktors — Tue, 18 Oct 2005 14:06:13 +0000

ProtoPage.com is probably the most beatiful Ajax application to show in 5 minutes to your boss and colleagues. Another interesting ~~poem~~code: Fish Eye (be patient – it’s loading very slowly).