Web Trends Highlights for June to September
⏰ Old Post
This post is over 12 years old - it might be slightly outdated and consigned to the history books.
We've picked some of the more interesting bits and have rounded them up below.
Remember you can always see the latest web trends for free at http://trends.builtwith.com.
Twitter / TweetMeme Show Down
In August, Twitter announced the Tweet Button, the defacto button up until that time had been TweetMeme's very popular button.
It took two weeks for Twitter to get to the same market share that TweetMeme took a year to reach which is a telling signal for anyone competing with Twitter as a third party.
Tweet Button vs. TweetMeme Top 10k
The Tweet Button rise in usage was very quick and looks to have started to cut into TweetMeme's share of the "Tweet This!" market with the TweetMeme button now in decline.
Google Buzz more a wimper
Google Buzz's "Share This" feature, that lets users share information about the website they are on via Buzz, has failed to gain any traction, with only about 300 of the top 1,000,000 sites having a Buzz button or follow link on their homepage. It's usage is actually increasing but at a very slow rate, with only a handful of sites implementing the technology each month. This evidence along with Leo Laporte's recent problems with Google Buzz lets us to believe this could
be another recent Google feature not gaining traction. Facebook and Twitter's social implementation are doing very well in comparison.
Google Buzz Usage Statistics
Google are already top of nearly every other category on BuiltWith Trends (analytics, advertising, content delivery networks), they have a little way to go before reaching the top of social, maybe Google Me will be their breakthrough!
Getting old browsers to behave
Modern web browsers are supporting more and more cool features, making it easier for developers to build exciting websites, but what about all those older browsers that don't support this new functionality, how are they supposed
to work? Traditionally a developer would spend days, weeks, months writing hacks to get their website working in multiple browsers. Conditional Comments are now in use on a third of the top ten thousand sites and a fifth of the top million, and new frameworks like modernizr are being developed to make cross-browser compatibility easier and easier, it's easy to see why these technologies are taking off.
Modernizr Usage Statistics
Chartbeat an analytics player
Since the start of August, Chartbeat, an analytics provider, has really started taking off. It fills the gap that Google Analytics (the biggest analytics player on the internet) left in its product by not providing a "real-time" aspect to analytics reporting. Will the growth continue into the future and will Google improve its analytics product to complete with Chartbeat?
Chartbeat Usage Statistics
Goodbye 8 bit
8 bit is sooooooo 1975! When we started tracking trends over two years ago ISO/IEC 8859 encoding, an 8 bit set of encoding series, was in use by nearly half of websites on the internet, it's now in use on less than a third.
The encoding group looking after ISO/IEC 8859 ceased operating in 2004 in favour of concentrating on universal character sets such as UTF-8 and UTF-16. UTF-8 has now skyrocketed and is well on the way to being the defacto standard for the internet.
ISO/IEC 8859 Slippery Slope
