Measureful, a company that turns Google Analytics data into useful digestible reports, recently released an awesome infographic that shows some of the top e-commerce shopping cart technologies used on the web and how they are distributed. They used BuiltWith Trends and TrendsPro to generate some of the data used in their infographic.
Google recently announced on their office blog that they would be doing a “second spring cleaning” and shutting down Google Reader, one of the worlds most popular RSS reader tools on the web.
Most Google Reader users were unhappy and upset at Google’s decision to shutdown the tool with just 4 months notice. Of course there’s been a lot of great resources that provide alternatives, “State of RSS Readers” from SuperFeedr lists many alternatives and Digg Announced they are building their own.
Is RSS dead? Are we going back to the walled gardens of old with new social sharing platforms? Short answer… yes 
RSS was well received and adopted by the internet community in the early 2000′s, it was one of the first structure data formats that had mass acceptance on the web and was just what the web needed in terms of providing a central interface for users who followed many news and blog sources as they could now subscribe to these RSS feeds in a feed reader, see things they hadn’t read and access them in a new easy to use interface.
BuiltWith currently tracks around 10 million sites that have RSS integration on their homepage, not bad considering we know of around 136 million resolvable websites in total, some of which are parked/non-responsive.
In October 2012 the amount of sites in the top 10k advertising an RSS feed in their page meta tags started to fall as shown in the chart above, more time might be needed to see if this is a constant drop or temporary. The shutdown of Google Reader might add more fuel to the fire in terms of decisions to remove RSS from a website altogether.
Open Graph Protocol was designed by Facebook to make sharing easier. If you entered a website URL into Facebook to share, the title, description and image, at a basic level, can format the way the website owner wants the data to appear.
OGP meta tags overtook RSS meta tags at the start of September 2012 and are continuing to increase in usage, is this the signal that social news is the new RSS? We hope not but the data is starting to allude to that.
You can follow the trends in web technology usage on BuiltWith Trends. Discuss this on Hacker News.
We recently completed a new “Rest of Web” lookup. Our “Rest of Web” coverage now stands at 136 million resolving websites, based on our database of 10.1 billion (yes billion!) potential websites.
BuiltWith Trends covers the top 1 million sites on the web and our “top site” coverage is based on our ever changing list of approximately 2.1 million sites, but there’s an additional 136 million sites which have been registered and exist in some form or another on the web. Since our last Rest of Web coverage update in 2012 we thought we’d share with you some of the big winners in the “Rest of Web” coverage. We’ve filtered out any where our methodology changed to make the increases a true representation of technology growth.
Google Font API
Added almost 600,000 websites bringing its rest of web coverage to 2.28 million websites. 83,000 sites removed Cufón, 44,000 sites added TypeKit. View Google Font API Top Site Trends.
960.gs
This grid system added 166,872 sites bringing its rest of web coverage to over 5 million unique websites. View 960.gs Top Site Trends.
HTML5 DocType, HTML5 Tags and HTML5 Shiv
The websites outside of the top sites are all adding HTML5 functionality as the web progresses, adding over half a million HTML5 DocType and Tags sites to the web and 350,000 new sites using the HTML5 Shiv. Search for HTML5 Trends.
Piwik Web Analytics
Added almost 30,000 new sites bringing its Rest of Web total into the 439,000 mark! View Piwik Top Site Trends.
Perfect Audience
They’ve grown 18x since we last looked in the rest of web from 71 sites to 1290! The fact they just started when we did out last update might reflect a larger increase but still a very impressive number (and we use them!). View Perfect Audience Trends.
The new rest of web numbers will be updated on the Trends site shortly and the results are already available on TrendsPro.
We can’t believe how fast the year is going already! We wanted to tell you about some new functionality coming to BuiltWith this month, the BuiltWith API will soon be providing new functionality and deeper knowledge on website technology usage.
The current API (APIv1) lets you perform lookups on websites in much the same manner as you see using the technology lookup tool at http://builtwith.com. The new API (APIv2) provides much more in-depth knowledge about websites. Some of the new features are listed below -
We’ll also be providing some awesome visualization tools to make working with the API easier for non-techies, such as the one shown on this page, the example shown here shows an APIv2 analysis of smh.com.au, an Australian newspaper, it’s clear to see from this visualization that they value their analytics tools greatly and have switched providers in the past, it also shows they made the jump from Apache to nginx and that they’ve stuck with DoubleClick for as long as we’ve tracked them for.
We expect many more useful and interesting data insights to come out of APIv2 and are looking forward to making it available for consumption in the near future.
BuiltWith is coming to the USA in 2013 between the 8th and 15th of March. We will be visiting SXSW, Austin and San Francisco on our whistle stop tour and would love to meet you, find out your use cases and finally put a face behind the emails and phone calls.
We will be attending SXSW this year between Friday 8th and Tuesday 12th of March, look out for us around the events (in the BuiltWith t-shirt) or contact us to arrange a meet up!
We’ll be in downtown San Francisco region from Wednesday 13th of March to Friday the 15th. Contact us if you’d like to meet up with us in the heart of Silicon Valley.
We’d love to see you and learn about some of your uses and requirements for BuiltWith!
Not in the USA? We’ll be coming to London, England in July 2013. Let us know where you are and we’ll try and come visit you on our next international tour.
We’re excited to announce that grant winner Phillip Smith from PBS MediaShift IdeaLab has started an in depth report on the technology used on top news websites on the internet.
Phillip will be doing research on a number of news agencies, including CNN Interactive, The Huffington Post, BBC News, New York Times, FoxNews.com and The Guardian to name just a few of the sites, a full list can be found at Phillip’s opening blog entry “Investigating the Technology Underlying Top News Organizations” over at PBS.
We are going to help Phillip by providing technology data for his initial technology research of these news organizations and are looking forward to the further research he does on them.
You can follow Phillip’s progress and blog entries on the PBS IdeaLab site - http://www.pbs.org/idealab/psmith/
We are now performing full index data lookups on BuiltWith top sites (over two million websites) on a weekly basis.
Previously to detect web technologies BuiltWith downloaded the HTML that renders the homepage of the site. In 2013 this is no longer sufficient to detect all technologies. “View Source” on any modern website framework and all you will see is a skeleton of what the website is actually built with thanks to client side rendering and the increasing use of JavaScript.
Full index means we render the full website, follow redirects, execute JavaScript, load Iframes and download all the resources that make up a page.
How full index is different
This allows us to uncover more technologies and provide a more accurate BuiltWith experience. The following improvements will be found within Trends, TrendsPro reports and standard technology lookups -
Advertising
Many advertising technologies are loaded behind iframes and/or instantiated from JavaScript. Full site rendering means we’ll be able to identify and see these technologies now.
Tag Managers
Websites using tag management systems load additional third party analytics and tracking technologies differently to their default installation. Full index provides us with the ability to track them regardless of how they are implemented in the original HTML.
Custom Installs
Website owners tweak their code to run as fast as possible, especially mission critical websites where 1 second extra of load time reduces engagement. These websites sometimes have totally customized installations where we would previously have missed third party scripts loading because they would not match the majority of detection techniques we use.
Our old method meant providing a technology lookup for a website required one “GET” request for content. So 2 million sites required 2 million lookups, full index proved a challenge because it requires as many lookups as the webpage requires to render the page, additional compute time to render JavaScript, CSS and Images and an additional compute time required to find the technologies in all of the additional resources.
Web page download request increase.
At our last run 2.4 million top sites create 92.4 million records. Some of these requests are for cached content or rendering errors with the site (a single image being downloaded many times for example) but show the scaling required to provide a level of detail unprecedented in web technology research.
tl;dr
We’ve greatly improved technology lookup, Trends and TrendsPro accuracy and coverage by doing full website page loads.
Happy new year! BuiltWith has started 2013 in brand new offices. Located opposite Manly Wharf in Manly, Sydney, Australia we are a quick and picturesque 15 minute ferry ride to and from Sydney CBD.
The work life balance
Manly is a popular tourist location and is on every Sydney visitors itinerary. We are located on the peninsula between Sydney Harbor and the Pacific Ocean, both offering a variety of activities including surfing, kayaking, sailing and many more.
We’ve got a large space with fantastic Sydney Harbor views and created a green themed office to match our logo! Thanks Ikea!
Andrew and Amy using the green desks.
Our green themed office entrance opposite Manly Wharf.
Modern architecture in newly renovated environmentally friendly office space.
This is right on our door step, perfect for mid morning swims!
We’re well located for business meetings in the city and are a 30 minute journey on boat and train to Sydney International Airport with multiple daily direct flights to San Francisco, Los Angeles, Dallas, Tokyo, Singapore, Shanghai, Dubai, Buenos Aires and connecting flights to London and New York.
Come visit us!
We are now located at Suite 206, 46-48 East Esplanade, Manly and accept visitors every day of the week (let us know you’re coming though!)
We’ve just updated our BuiltWith Firefox Add-on to make it easier and simpler to find. Instead of in the add-on bar it now sits in the Navigation Bar, a lot like our Google Chrome extension.
The other change is the BuiltWith widget now appears in a nice in browser window.
Download BuiltWith Firefox Add-on Version 1.9.5
The Wall Street Journal recently published a piece on the use of tracking technologies on the web and how the line between real life identities and online browsing habits are being tracked and shared.
BuiltWith helped out with this research piece by providing information on what sites had some form of social integration and how just by having connections back to social networks like Google+, Twitter and LinkedIn provides them with an unprecedented overview of a persons online behavior.