Google Tops Feed Reader and Social Bookmark Rankings

slow news day

On the contrary, this has challenged a lot of the preconceptions I had. I would have guessed that digg was a much bigger fish than del.icio.us before seeing these stats, and the huge (18%!) long tail of feed readers is interesting too. Thanks for posting, Erick!

Thats some nice info…

Must I say it again? All of this “Social” stuff is just a fad, a passing fancy, bellbottoms, flattops, Mac computers, …. It will soon be a distant memory and all that’s left of it will be the Microsoft Cloud!

http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com

Hi,

A bit off-topic but do you know something about Facebook running Google Adsense?
http://adscriptum.blogspot.com.....sense.html
Jean-Marie

Digg is not as popular as one might think judging from this chart. Delicious is the winner.

The amount of Digg This buttons on sites - and the new flood of “Top 10″ this and “TOP 10″ that - would certainly make you think otherwise.

But can anyone imagine how much insane traffic one would get by being on the homepage of all of those sites listed - at the same time?!

I am surprised not to see techcrunch in the list.

http://vidsonly.blogspot.com

It is surprising that native-browser bookmarking has ticked back up. Is because people are importing their favorites to firefox? Did it pass delicious because delicious is shedding users to facebook?

What a coincidence - the top three “adding services” are shown at the top of the add-this list page. Maybe it doesn’t make a difference or maybe does…

Nice graph at the bottom…really.

Never thought that Google is big in social bookmarking. I mean they are into bookmarking but “social”?? Do they have any site to share bookmarks? They have a site that keeps all your bookmarks online but I don’t think that accessible by anybody else.
Delicious = which Google site??

Google very recently added share/Email this service. I don’t think that grew so fast.

I love netvibes and being able to see multiple feeds nicely grouped on one page is what sold me on it. I tried Google Reader before and didn’t like the scrolling aspect of it.

Are there any switch-worthy advantages that Google Reader has over Netvibes?

Why yahoo is not in the wagon.
http://blogkatt.blogspot.com

Can i subscribe to all feeds from blogspot(blogger) from google reader?

@11, you are right, not all the bookmarking services on the list are social. I don’t think it’s easy to share your Google bookmarks, for instance, unless you export them and then import them elsewhere. And favorites on your browser are generally not shared either. So think of that list as a combination of social and personal bookmarks, since AddThis measures both.

@9, good point, people do tend to click on whatever is on top, and that may be biasing this list.

Great Article!!! I always wanted to know stats for these icons.
Instead of using all of these I just want to use the ones that bring the majority of traffic. These social bookmarks companies are popping everyday. So now you can keep an eye to see if its worth including it. Similar post on Social Bookmarks how to and adsense: http://nextwaverider.blogspot......-blog.html

Sure you can share your bookmarks in Google…

http://www.google.com/s2/sharing/stuff

db

AddThis is a great tool. I use it as an internet retailer and it gives another insight into customer’s bookmarking interests and the button is a reminder that they can bookmark our articles, products, etc.

This is interesting indeed. At the same time, it is also useful to remember this is a snapshot of one organization’s (AddThis) users. I’d assume there are significant biases in the data.

did anyone stop to think that perhaps people who use del.icio.us would rather use their bookmarklet than some stupid “addthis” button, which actually *increases* the amount of work necessary to bookmark a site?

compare with these data: http://friendfeed.com/static/i.....-users.png

and friendfeed is predominantly googlers.

Isn’t the real story here “Favorites”?

I mean, these stats only show those people who used AddThis to add a bookmark to their browsers (second most popular), which is an indirect way to bookmark a page in your browser.

What about those who just added a bookmark in their browser directly or with Ctrl+D without using AddThis?

If you add those in, old style bookmarking is still much bigger than social bookmarking.

That has implications for our current approaches to writing elements.

My God! How many ways can Erick come up with to increase his Google stock?
Seriously, was he hired just to report favorably on Google, the data be damned?

Here’s a hint: when you say “social bookmarking”, you better actually use SOCIAL bookmarking stats. A run-of-the-mill bookmarking service doesn’t cut it.

Rly? I though everyone just used the RSS icon in the URL field. Who knew?

@17, you are right that Google Shared Stuff is a type of social bookmark, but it is a different service than Google Bookmarks. And it doesn’t seem like you can even save pages from Google Shared Stuff into your Google Bookmarks, which are pretty much private.

Here’s info about Shared Stuff:

http://www.google.com/s2/shari...../help.html

Here’s a good FAQ page about Google Bookmarks:

http://googlesystem.blogspot.c.....s-faq.html

Thanks Erick! Great great article!

@20 - Roger, I suggest you add the AddThis button on your site/blog for a couple of days, and then look at the free stats we provide. You will see that your users are not just using del.icio.us. By only including the del.icio.us button 1) you are making it difficult for the rest of the users to bookmark, and 2) you are missing the chance to share/promote your content on these other services.

Also, what is interesting about these stats is that they are very different from site to site. Some sites have Facebook or Digg way at the top, others have del.icio.us or Reddit, or also favorites (local bookmarks).

The data that we just published is an average across all accounts (website/blogs) in our database for the whole month of September.

@9 - Chris, good point; we thought about this issue a lot…”the rich gets richer”. This is in fact how most user-driven ranking system work. I can think of a lot of examples, including the bookmarking services themselves. The more a page/link gets posted on Digg or Del.icio.us, the more visible it becomes, the more it gets posted again, and the more visible it becomes, etc.

When deciding on the order of the services on AddThis, we do look at these statistics, but we also take into account the user experience, what users expect to see first. And again this is different from site to site, in some cases we provides a customized version of the button.

-Dom

(AddThis.com)

Google Shared Stuff was launched very quietly for some reason, so it’s difficult to gauge how many people are using it. We will add it as soon as there is a demand for it.

Also, it is surprising that Google decided to create a completely new product instead of enhancing Google Bookmarks. It certainly goes against Brin’s call for more features and fewer products.

-Dom

This is very interesting, but i also want to know the growth rate.

http://familyresource4u.wordpress.com

Google doe not exist!
How can a non-existent company be in any list?

http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com

Am I mistaken? Or is this data skewed? This is data from Add-This - correct? So what. Do they have penetration on 100% of the world’s websites? I am more interested in how many people used their widget (code) over a specific period of time. The good news is that it is being used and one can now ponder using one piece of code that gets surfers to all of the bookmarking / RSS services versus piles of code. I like Add-This because it tells me what is happening from a linking perspective for all of our sites - easily - and for free!

mashable raises some good points:

‘Google Reader stats, in case you don’t know, are bullshit. In fact, all Feedburner stats for most top blogs are bullshit due to the effect of default feeds. Want 80,000 free subscribers? How about 200K or more?’

http://mashable.com/2007/10/15.....ith-proof/

I emailed AddThis about this stats a few weeks ago, and I’m glad they updated it (the previous charts had data only up to May, if I recall correctly).

However, I’d love to know more about that tail (and I’ve asked Dom from AddThis.com) about that. I’d love to see the numbers for Simpy, of course, but also a few other services.

I’m also surprised to see Y! MyWeb there. I thought that was a pretty dead service. Ask? Ask has a social bookmarking service? I didn’t even know (and still don’t know where it lives).

@25
Again, Dom/AddThis, show us what is in that 18.6%, please!

We Love Google buddy ….To Feed and BookMark….Is there who does not like google…

I’m really surprised by the “Other” column for Social Bookmarking, any graphs on there compositions?

Thanks for sharing the info !

http://circut-city.blogspot.com