Pat

Top 10 Widgets on the Web

ghostery:

This is the second in a series of posts coming this week on the Top Web Bug Trackers we saw at Ghostery last month.

Noteable:

1. It’s all about Sharing. 4 of the top 10 widgets (AddThis, DiggThis, ShareThis and AddToAny) are focused on letting users rate or recommend content.
2. Wow, AddThis is twice as large as its next 3 competitors combined.
3. Portable Social Networks: Facebook and MySpace were missing in action. Twitter Badge, MyBlogLog and Google FriendConnect own the category.
4. Search is still it. The Google Custom Search widget is 4x the size of either Google Widgets and Google FriendConnect.

Embed:
Rank Tracker 1 AddThis 2 Google Custom Search 3 Twitter Badge 4 MyBlogLog 5 DiggThis 6 ShareThis 7 Google Widgets 8 Alexa Traffic Rank 9 Google FriendConnect 10 AddtoAny Widget Analysis by Ghostery - June 2009

Next up is our Top 10 Web Analytic Trackers report. Please let me know how can we make these reports better.

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Methodology: This data was compiled via the GhostRank submissions of our users. Thanks to all of you who have opt-ed into sharing the bugs you find with the community none of this could be possible without your contributions.

GhostRank is an opt-in feature included in Ghostery that allows users to submit the bugs they find across the web.

Today we measure the existence of web bugs on a per-domain basis (E.g. google.com, wordpress.com, etc). What this means is that sites like “tumblr.com” and “blogspot.com” would only count as one site when in reality there are 1000s of sites hosted on those platforms under subdomains, i.e. “ghostery.tumblr.com”.

Future versions of our tracker reports will be based on subdomains in order to more accurately measure “website” distribution.

Contact form notices are funny

It’s always mildly funny to me when contact forms have a bold, sometimes all-caps, sometimes red line like, **NOTICE**: This form is for [this] and [that] ONLY. Please do NOT send us [The Kicker] using this form.

You can identify immediately what annoys them most, and wonder what odd # of email subjects they get that drives them up the wall.  Do they have a breaking point before calling it quits?  Or will they finally invest in fixing their site design and/or making that one form more intuitive?  I favor the latter suggestion.  But to imagine the degree of one’s frustration to post such a notice and their lack of a better initiative, and then to think of those poor users that they shame…

I think both parties deserve to meet each other.