a Global Bridge

Ok kiddos, here it is my monthly review of Alexa traffic stats for popular social networking and related sites.  I have even attached a chart this time around, for you visually minded folks!

And the skinny is this, Twitter (up 116.7%), Mashable (up 82.8%) and Digg (up 54.4%) have all seen tremendous growth in the past three months.  Not surprisingly, Twitter-related sites have seen marked growth as well, with the greatest growth at Bit.ly (up 180%) and HootSuite (up 169%).  It helps to get a good following going on Twitter as well.  Commonly tweeted sites such as huffingtonpost.com (up 50%), Alltop.com (up 41%) and tearn.com (up 96%) are all seeing strong growth!

On the down side, MySpace is down 5.7% and Live.com is down a little over 10%. 

The biggest mover & shaker was Microsoft's new search engine Bing.com up a whopping 472.4% - but that's over a three month period and Bing's only been around for a little while.  Still, it is huge growth.  Microsoft.com (the site) is down 5.8% while Apple.com is up 19% (with a huge spike in traffic on Sept. 9th - wonder why?).

Technical review sites such as Slashdot.org and TechCrunch.com also saw big growth (46.7% & 75.2% respectively).  Think Twitter helps with getting the word out and driving traffic?  I think so.

Happy to say that Posterous is continuing its drive into blogosphere, up 180% over the past three months!

Hope you've got social!  If not now, when?

Who remembers AltaVista?  Anyone?  Anyone?  That's what I thought.  The roller coaster ride that is Internet success and dominance can be pretty short-lived.  In a world where ranking at the top may last for all of a few months (think Bebo), I thought we'd close the week with a look at who's up and who's down according to Alexa, a division of Amazon and the queen bee of traffic stats and web site rankings.

First, the bad news.  Things are looking down at Skyrock by 25.6%.  Didn't I say the French were coming over to Facebook in droves?  It's down at blog if you dare WordPress by 25.9%, and Go.com (which powers things like espn.go.com) is down a whopping 46%!  That can't be good for Berman and company.

Not surprisingly, the big players in social media have done quite well.  On the bright side, Twitter is up 137.8%.  LinkedIn and Facebook are up by 32% & 20.6% respectively.  FriendFeed? It's up 57%.   Mashable? Up 65%.  Computer news site CNET is up 23.3%.  While my favorite new blog host, Posterous, is the king daddy riser of them all up 134% (at least that I could find, I had to run through the links manually doncha know). 

Live Strong, the Lance Armstrong foundation, is up 76%.  While not a social media outlet per se, they run a mean marketing splash online!  Guess that's paying off.

It's worth mentioning that up or down, simply ranking on Alexa's list of top 500 websites is a feat!  But, there's a train fillin' up and gettin' ready to leave town.  Hop on board while the tickets are still cheap!

** note:  All web traffic stats are the percentage of change in global visitors over the past 3 months.