Why Facebook Looks Like Twitter...

Here is a snapshot of the traffic on these websites, ranked where "1" is the most visted website on the 'net, and 10000 is the 10000th most visited website. As you can see...Facebook is plateauing with a gentle increase in the past year, Yahoo has seen a recent sharp drop, twitter.com and ning.com are experiencing significant increases, with Twitter being the most pronounced most recently, and second life has a steady decline.
Now its interesting that roughly when Twitter sees the spike in their useage is close to just before we saw facebook change its pages and profiles to look almost exactly like twitter's.

My purpose in grouping these particular websites is to draw a comparison between sites that are "open" and let you put content from them on other websites, and others that are "closed" AKA "walled gardens" that will let you post content to them from other sites, but they wont let you pull content from them to other sites.

Yes, the sites in decline or plateauing fit the walled garden category, with Second Life being the most severe walled garden largely due to the bulky client "viewer".

Conversely the sites with the sharpest increases in traffic allow you to easily put content YOU create on their sites on whatever other sites you want. Twitter makes this perhaps easier than any of them.

Again, this is all predicted in "What would Google Do" by Jeff Jarvis, and its interesting to see which companies here need to smarten up, and which ones are the future leaders, so lets just hope for their sake when they do get to the top...they dont forget how they got there, like Mr. Zuckerberg apparently has begun to do.

Run your own analysis for free at Alexa and see how your favorite sites stack up! Just replace the sites in the text boxes with whatever you want for .com and play with the date ranges. Its a very handy, free tool that makes Alexa another big winner in the traffic world. If only the big CEO's would realize, the most honest, open companies will always win in a world where "Free is a business model".

In facebook, it would be great if you could RSS the updates feed, and all the feeds, for that matter, and get the content out from inside the "blue and white utopia" of facebook if we wanted to. Its our content after all right?