---
title: "R/WW Trend Watch: User-generated Sites Define This Era of the Web"
date: 2006-11-26
author: "Richard MacManus"
categories:
  - name: "ReadWriteWeb"
    url: "/category/readwriteweb.md"
tags:
  - name: "2006"
    url: "/tag/2006.md"
---

# R/WW Trend Watch: User-generated Sites Define This Era of the Web

Lloyd Sakazaki has written a [good overview](https://web.archive.org/web/20090125100802/http://internet.seekingalpha.com/article/20852) of recent trends in global websites. It is based on Alexa data, a stats source which comes under regular fire for its faults (most recently ex-Netscape boss Jason Calacanis [ took aim](https://web.archive.org/web/20090125100802/http://www.calacanis.com/2006/11/24/alexa-is-100-wrong-and-you-can-game-it-with-as-few-as-three-mac/)). Nevertheless, there are some interesting underlying trends in the Seeking Alpha article. Not new trends, but well stated.

Over a two year period (Nov 2004 – Nov 2006), there have been 5 new websites enter the top 15 of Alexa in reach – myspace.com, live.com, youtube.com, orkut.com, wikipedia.org. Two of those are now owned by Google, which of course has shown significant growth of its own accord over the past two years.

The overall trend is that **user-generated content** is the defining feature of all of the new top 15 sites – except maybe live.com, which is basically just a replacement (sometimes a duplicate) of other microsoft properties in Alexa. So whether you call this current era of the Web the Read/Write Web, or Web 2.0, or whatever – the proof of how it is different is right there in those alexa stats. Also as Sakazaki nicely points out, the success of **search** in this era is derived from the growth in user-generated content – since there is so much content nowadays.

Incidentally, behind the tired and tabloid-level communism references in [this Register piece](https://web.archive.org/web/20090125100802/http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2006/11/25/forward_to_the_distributed_revolution/) – lies a good point. Is Ajax a strong enough technology to take us to the next era of the Web? Perhaps not. But I agree with [Ryan Stewart’s assessment](https://web.archive.org/web/20090125100802/http://blog.digitalbackcountry.com/?p=563) that, for all its faults, “Ajax has done a lot to raise the expectations of end users and gotten developers to think differently”. Also I’d add, as the Google Docs & Spreadsheets developers [suggested recently](https://web.archive.org/web/20090125100802/http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_docs_and_spreadsheets_interview.php), that Ajax is still the most ‘web native’ way to develop interactive web apps. Although having said that, I don’t believe myspace, youtube, wikipedia or orkut rely to any great extent on Ajax? So it’s not like this era of the Web is *dependent* on Ajax. It’s an enabling technology, but not the essence of the Web circa 2006.

Anyway, back to the high level trends. Seeking Alpha also notes that many of the fastest-growing websites are localized Google properties – showing two clear trends, the **importance of Google** and the **internationalization of the Web**. The former gets plenty of press and blog coverage, the latter less so. But both are of equal importance in my view.

Pic: [Orli Yakuel](https://web.archive.org/web/20090125100802/http://www.flickr.com/photos/orliy1/255686688/) (who got it [from scifi.com](https://web.archive.org/web/20090125100802/http://blog.scifi.com/tech/archives/2006/09/28/shift_the_web_2_1.html))

*Originally published on ReadWriteWeb ([archived copy](https://web.archive.org/web/20020204040018/http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_docs_and_spreadsheets_interview.php))*