« Friends Reunited - Interesting Gadget | Home | More on YouTube »
The Next Round of Potentially “Breakout” Web 2.0 Sites
By Admin | November 19, 2007
Site: 
Description: Fanpop is a brand-new social networking site that looks to have an impressive growth rate. Fanpop’s Alexa chart is almost vertical despite having just been launched at the beginning of August, a chart that looks an awful lot like Facebook’s did early on. It’ll be interesting to see if they can keep it up. The site is squarely aimed at a younger audience interested in fandom subjects of all kinds including celebrities, news, trivia, and much more. The thing that struck me most positively about Fanpop is that it’s startlingly well designed and easy-to-use. This is one of the essential ingredients for making a site maximally usable to users from all walks of life. Ease of use also sustains viral propagation. The sign up process smoothly walks you through an impressively simple, yet multistep process that makes the effort of signing up and creating your own Fanpop “spot” one of the best examples of the Lazy Registration pattern that I’ve yet seen. Lots of Web 2.0 best practices abound on Fanpop and its traffic stats show it, including the top 100 posts of the day right on the main page.
Site: 
Description: Zango is an interesting Web 2.0 site that touts its online games, advertising network, and use generated content. But it’s an intriguing yet strange blend of media and delivery approaches, and their site’s main tagline says it best, “Zango offers a vast network of free ad-supported games, videos and downloads powered by proprietary and revolutionary time-shifted advertising technology. Zango allows users, publishers, content providers and advertisers to connect within one unique online community.” While Publish and Upload buttons are clearly prominent on the top of the site, it’s unclear how much content is actually being contributed by users other than their attention. Despite any questions about the Web 2.0 “purity” of the site, it’s clearly growing steadily despite a bit of slowdown lately, but it’s traffic charts continue show good day-in, day-out increases. Overall, the site seems to have borrowed some from the MySpace playbook in terms of look-and-feel, though its means of viral distribution has come under scrutiny lately.
Site: 
Description: I’ve been tracking last.fm for a while and many of you will be quite familiar with it. Recently entering the top 500 sites on the entire Internet, last.fm’s product has become progressively slicker and smoother in recent months. At its core, Last.fm is an online radio station with a compulsive social dimension. Really, to even call it an online radio station is to do it a major disservice. Their music streaming application will “scrobble” up information about the tracks you play in the music player on your PC and then use this information to carefully tailor music selections for you. It’s very Web 2.0-like in that the more you use the service the better it gets. Like the other sites profiled here, last.fm seems to be growing steadily, its recent growth very likely having to do with some of the social sharing tools they make available to make your personal musical data available on MySpace,LiveJournal, and others. This of course spreads awareness of last.fm virally on the major social networks.
Site: 
Description: Though it can seem like social networking sites are popping up everywhere, Bebo has been with us for a while and famously shunned a half-billion dollar acquisition deal while “only” barely making the cut for the top 400 sites in the world. But what kind of social network is Bebo specifically? The top menu of the site says it all and offers users to select among Bands, Colleges, and other Schools. Bebo offers the usual online social networking flair including the sharing of personal pages, videos, images, and even offers a friends location mashup with Google Maps from the main page. Again, like many of these sites, the mystique can be hard to figure out for those of us not in high school or college, but certainly the demographic is quite good and their site traffic is clearly rising despite the school age set being on summer break at the moment.
Site: 
Description: Friendster has been with us for a while now and has famously waxed and waned over the last year or so. Currently, Friendster is on a major upswing and currently ranks in the top 50 of all Internet sites, claiming over 30 million online profiles on the main page. Like all successful social networking sites, Friendster makes sure the focus on people with a heavy emphasis on shared media, particularly pictures. What’s not as clear to me — and hopefully one of you can share — why it’s currently undergoing is pretty significant resurgence. A lot of the social sites I evaluated for this list were flat or declining, but Friendster has clearly recaptured its magic somehow. In any case, if it’s current uptick continues, it could potentially enter the top 10 within the year. The chart to the right is also different than the ones above and has a longer time period so you could see that Friendster has recently eclipsed its initial popularity peak in late 2004.
Site: 
Description: Like Friendster, Eurekster was one of the original Web 2.0-style sites and these days it seems to be reaching a high level maturity. Eurekster’s main page does a good job demonstrating the amount of buzz and industry press they are receiving for their concept of vertical community Web search. I’ve previously gotten quite a bit of traffic from Eurekster and so I know that people seem to be using it quite a bit. Eurekster is organized around the concept of a search wiki or ’swicki’ , that narrows and targets the search to that it’s more relevant. Sporting nearly 20,000 swickis, Eurekster seems to have reached a tipping point for growth and is beginning to get a good head of steam built up. Will it be a Google disruptor? It depends of course, but the the potential for doing just this is why it’s on this list.
Site: 
Description: I included TMZ.com purely as an outlier because it’s a significant new player from AOL, has some good early traffic patterns, and will either flame-out soon or possibly really make it. Right now it seems to be struggling for traffic but has done very well in recent weeks. I included this as an example of older new media trying to launch new sites to capture the Web 2.0 spark, but the site clearly seems too editorially controlled despite the usual Most Commented lists, requests for stories, and user submission forms (which seem too hard to find.) Is TMZ serious about network effects, capturing user contributions and making a name for itself? It’s not clear that it has the right ingredients and could make an excellent site to watch for how to make a Web 2.0 play after coming out of the gate with promise yet shaky legs.
Updated Site: 
Description: Popurls was in my original research notes for this list but I’ve finally decided to add it after the releasing original post because it’s visitor traffic and its leveraging of the Database of Intentions seems to warrant it. Essentially a mashup of the Web’s most popular meme filters of the day, Popurls is in a similar service space as my overall favorite collective intelligence news filter, TechMeme. I’ve received varying levels of traffic from Popurls over the last few months and a tour of the site can show you why that might be; they have been aggressively expanding the content that they list on their main page to a great many credible sources on the Web. Fortunately, except for the case of del.icio.us/popular bookmarks, they are fair about it and route traffic to the news site they are aggregating, rather that directing them to underlying content. And while Popurls does not directly collect content from users , it does leverage it indirectly, and its site organization and quality experience alone deserves its five-star rating from Alexa.
Topics: Web2.0 Related, News, Uncategorized |