Congratulations to the team at Compete for eclipsing Alexa!

It was just a year ago that we launched Compete.com. We weren’t sure what would happen by opening up the aggregate data that we used internally. All we were certain about was that it was time to end the barrier that always stood between those who contributed the data (”users” or worse yet, “panelists”) and those who made use of that data (”marketers”).

Naturally many saw this as an unnecessary distraction at a time when our core business had just hit its tipping point. But a few of us kept pushing the idea forward and with the support of Don McLagan, our CEO, and Stephen DiMarco we were able to launch Compete.com.

I’d like to publically thank what I consider to be the “original” Compete.com team:

TJ Mahony - (Now at FlipKey)
Carl Query - (Now at FlipKey)
Laura Currea
Jay Meattle
Lauren Moores
Roy Todd II
Adam Tornes
Max Freiert

Ryan Carrigg

I’m sure I’m forgetting someone, if so please let me know.

There are many others who have worked hard to make Compete.com succesful since, Thanks to all of you for taking it further than we could have imagined.

If you know me then you know I like to email interesting stuff I find out on the INTERNETS.

Early this year my link emailing really got out of control and I had no choice but to create an app to streamline the process. Having all my recommendations in one central location was a bonus. This spring Jay and I launched Bzzster just to “scratch our own itch“.

Since launching Bzzster Jay and I have each emailed over 1000 links to friends via Bzzster. What’s been surprising though is how many people have found it and use it everyday. Although I haven’t had much time recently (see Lookery) to work on Bzzster Jay has been pushing things along nicely.

A few months ago Jay created a firefox extension named Shareholic. Shareholic makes sharing with Bzzster easier plus it adds a bunch of other sharing options including Twitter, Facebook and del.icio.us.

Jay just updated Shareholic last week with a bunch of new features and a brand new icon. We were using the common share icon for the extension but ran into some copyright issues since the project was acquired by the Share This guys.

Let me know how we can improve Shareaholic and Bzzster

P.S. Be careful with that Share Icon on your blog…

Been having fun using my Invisible Web GreaseMonkey script to see what analytic “beacon” scripts sites use.

“Invisible Web” parses each page you visit and looks for commonly used web bugs AKA beacons. If it discovers a javascript tag belonging to an analytics service it alerts you by showing the an icon (favicon) for that provider.

One of the more amusing relationships that I’ve found is between Facebook and Google. On the surface you would think the two would be enemies given Facebook coming after Google’s AdSense product with their new Social Ads platform.

It seems that Facebook does not share in the common competitive paranoia practice. Facebook is electively sharing their user and traffic intelligence with Google. They do this by using Google Analytics throughout their development site and by including Google Analytics as the only 3rd party analytics provider in their FBML specification. This allows app developers to include Google Analytics tracking for each of their apps.

Now I can’t imagine Google is actively pouring over individual Google Analytics accounts in order to “spy” on a competitor. But there are other ways that Google can use this data:

1. They can use the Facebook Apps data to learn more about you in order to tune the AdSense and AdWords ads they show you.
2. They can combine the Facebook data with other Google Analytics data and use it in its aggregate form to design new products and features. (Orkut?, OpenSocial?)

Tim’s post was right on, it’s the data stupid! With their analytics product Google has a view into most of its current and future competitors data.

Google Analytics is the most important Google application after Search.

But as McClure said NO ONE IS PAYING ANY F@#$ING ATTENTION.