Web site monitoring service Pingdom is out with another report today, this time focusing on Google Analytics usage within the Alexa top 500 sites. Pingdom verified each site and found that 32.3% of the top 500 use Google Analytics to monitor their sites. The 33% number is a bit high in my opinion. Most large sites use "industrial" analytics applications like Omniture or Webtrends.

Pingdom suggests that most use Google Analytics because it’s free. What we still do not know is how the data is used on the backend - even if Google suggests it’s not being used, it’s still being dumped into the huge database that Google maintains on each one of us.

My guess is that if Pingdom runs the same test on the top 2,000-10,000, the Google Analytics count will be much higher - probably in the 60% range. This is currently their sweet spot - outside the Fortune 500 and down to the brand new blog with one reader.

I still believe a combination of internal trackers and external trackers (both for the local site and for the competition) is the optimum combination for success.

If you are interested in not being tracked by Google as you browse site-to-site, check out James Thomas’ article about how he lives without Google.

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The fine folks at Web monitoring service Pingdom are out with their latest list. This time it’s Goole AdWords ads that have gone contextually wrong. From a new brain on eBay to visiting Hell with Kayak, these ads are a hoot.

Here are a couple of my favorites from the list:

Here we find that selling on eBay is like selling your soul - with all of the fees they charge and the PayPal fees, I guess it makes sense.

We already know that the Germans make the best knives (see latenight tv), now we know they make the best AdWords ads. I just love these ascii ads — too bad Google has banned them. I’ve watched that second car for hours and it never gets any closer to the car in front of it.

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We originally profiled Iterasi back in January when they launched at DEMO. The name Iterasi comes from the Portugese from iteration. The idea of the service is simple: save pages in their exact state for later use. The example is easy: you do a search on a site with an embedded Google map. You want to save the state of the Google map but currently if you favorite the page, you lose the actual map locations in the results. Iterasi saves the exact state of the page making it easy to come back to. It’s not saving the live page, rather the current page at the time of the save.

The saved page is called a "notarization" and monetization comes from very specific ad targeting since the page is saved. They have also released a new widget. The widget gives people the ability to use iterasi to embed clickable thumbnail images of the pages they are saving.

The other announcement the company is making is Alex Williams is joining the team as the Director of Product Marketing. Alex most recently worked for SplashCast Media.

If you would like access to the public beta, sign up here.

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Website monitoring company Pingdom is out with their downtime study for the top social networks for the first four months of 2008. Guess who leads with the most downtime? If you guessed Twitter, you win the prize! Pingdom reports that Twitter has been down over 37 hours in the past four months. Coming up right behind Twitter is the service that wants to go to Prom but has no date, Pownce. Pownce claims an exciting 13+ hours of downtime.

Big player networks MySpace and Facebook came in with 1 and 2 hours of downtime respectively. Now this makes sense, Twitter and Pownce are new and while it seems to the 250 that Twitter has been around forever, they haven’t. Part of their downtime is caused by maintenance and upgrades. Larger networks such as MySpace and Facebook have huge valuations which allow them to have the server capacity and production environments that don’t require downtime for changes.

Below is the downtime chart and also check Pingdom’s analysis.

Video messageboard application Seesmic appears to be entering the video blog comments game today. I suggested that Seesmic should get into this game last month (Loic, for the check, please spell my name Allen). Video host Viddler seems to be leading the video comments charge and currently their plugin works with Wordpress.

The new Seesmic video commenting system is live on Techcrunch (one of Seesmic’s investors). Here is a screenshot from a post on Techcrunch:

Unfortunately my video camera isn’t unpacked yet so I can’t test it. Michael Arrington from Techcrunch commented last week that he has a lot of trolls and losers who comment on TC and that he spends an hour every day removing comments. What will it be like now that there will be video?

I am guessing that if you post a video comment using the Seesmic plugin, it will create a thread in the Seesmic application. Will video comments help save Seesmic? Perhaps it will help as I’ve suggested before that I like the idea of being able to contribute in the fashion you prefer on a blog (audio, video, text). With Loic’s smile and charm, I am sure that many blogs will install the plugin which will lead to greater visibility for Seesmic. As for the Seesmic app itself, I still struggle as to why video is a better medium for a messageboard than text is.

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Source:CenterNetworks

Early this morning Orli Yakuel who runs the Go2Web20 startup directory had all of her direct messages (aka private messages) on Twitter exposed to her 600+ followers. Michael Arrington has a good recap of the issue on Techcrunch. The instant that I read about this trouble I thought it could be one of the large number of third-party apps built on Twitter’s API. Arrington has since updated his recap to note that it looks like it was a third-party app, GroupTweet that caused the direct messages to be shown to the public.

In this case, everyone seemed to immediately blame Twitter for the issue. As more platforms (Twitter is a platform) launch and more applications are built on top (e.g. Twhirl, FriendFeed, GroupTweet, etc.), we will need to determine methods and techniques to determine when the issues are with the platform and when they are with the application. By default, that isn’t an easy proposition.

Furthering the issue and making it more complex is the issue of installation and updates. For example, you install x app to work with Twitter today. You read the terms and are satisfied so you install. A couple of weeks go by and you are bored with it so you leave and move on to the next one. When the first app updates, you may get hit with the updates and not even remember that you installed the first app and blame the issue on the second app or the platform. See how complicated this can get? Where’s Columbo when you need him!

Here’s a startup idea: a tracker for Web apps that you’ve installed and their current status (installed, active, not active, deleted, etc.)

Of course with all of the issues Twitter has faced, I can see why the immediate blame went to them.

Source:CenterNetworks

Pingdom, the Web site monitoring tool (we use it on CN), has published a list of some of the weird domain names Google owns. As someone who used to manage a very large domain list, most of these are smart moves. Things like "googlesucks" and "gmailblows" are good to purchase to make sure they don’t end up in the wrong hands.

Some others on the list include:

• googlepoo.com
• googlewebmonitoring.com
• googlewarez.com — aah the early 90s
• googlesex.com - call girl search engine
• googlenewyork.com - oh yea!
• googledaycare.com - get them while they are young
• goooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooogle.com - yep, can you even count them without getting dizzy?
• thesecretofburritos.com - uhm, perhaps Google is getting into the content business?

Check out the full list on the Pingdom blog.

As a side note, if you are working on a startup, the Pingdom blog is a great learning tool about how to effectively use a blog to generate buzz and traffic. When people click the Pingdom link above to read more, they might venture out to the main Pingdom service. In any event, having a blog that pushes more than the normal product updates is critical to organic buzz generation.

Pingdom has released their latest downtime study - this time for the top social networks. Windows Live Spaces came in with the highest downtime - 3 hours in the last month. Pingdom notes, "In the Windows Live Spaces example, three hours may not sound like all that much over a month, but it is three hours of lost page views and ad exposure that Microsoft will never get back."

Other names in the list: MySpace and Facebook clocked in 10 minutes of downtime this month, Bebo at 30 minutes and Xanga at 2 hours. Yahoo 360 was the big winner with zero downtime in the month.

Don’t forget to check out Pingdom’s special offer for CN readers. Here is the chart from Pingdom:

Earlier today we posted an interview with Pingdom CEO Sam Nurmi. And now I have a very special offer for all of the CenterNetworks readers. Pingdom has been kind enough to share the following offer:

Using the discount code "centernetworks" (without the quotes) when signing up will give you a 50% discount AND 100 extra SMS for alerts.

To use the code, go to www.pingdom.com/signup, select one of the package types (not trial), and enter the code into the "promotional code" box and press "Apply code". This also works when upgrading from within a trial account.

Note that those 100 extra SMS are on top of the ones that come with theaccount. The promo code is active from today until the end ofthe year.

(CN does not make anything from this promotion, we are just trying to help out the CN community with a service we find valuable)

Part one - The State of the Industry, presented by the IAB

Moderated by Randall Rothenberg president and CEO of the IAB the panel was Suzie Reider, head of advertising sales for YouTube.com; Michael Barrett, executive VP Chief Revenue Officer Fox Interactive Media; Arianna Huffington - Co founder and Editor in Chief Huffington Post; Matt Freeman CEO Tribal DDB Worldwide.

Great conversation though I entered in the middle so missed some of their introductory remarks and discussions.

In the Q&A a lot of discussion about pre-roll (and how bad it can be). Including from the CEO of Tribal DDB Worldwide. Fox brought up 24. "Pre-roll is a clumsy way to get the sponsorship money" - "Ultimately we are not serving our clients well if we are irritating consumers"

Question about cookies - "education to the masses" (hmmm very odd perspective I think but he is assuming the audience is with him). IAB has launched a campaign around the value of interactive advertising - spywares w/cookies etc. Industry is trying to inform people. (Michael on the panel is on the IAB board)

Question about minors online (seems de rigueur for these types of panels)

Part two - Innovate or Die! Thriving in the age of disruption

Moderator -Jon Fine Media Columnist BusinessWeek. Panelists -Jason Hirschhorn president Sling Media Entertainment group; Paul Woolmington Founding Partner Naked Communications; Brad Jakeman Former Executive VP Creative Strategy Macy’s Inc (now a consultant).

Starts with a useful definition of disruption - consensus on breaking current models (that you didn’t create from one panelist). "Everyone worships change, it is cool to be disruptive". Why does this stuff matter? (Microsoft is still bigger than Apple - though I would personally argue this is misleading in some ways)

A bunch of discussion, now moved onto the logical area of music. Brought up LiveNation - and now cut off this topic (tabled for the hallway afterwords)

Great comment "that speech was zero calories" on political talks (I think the guy from Sling Media)

Pinging back to the first keynote today about threat from opting out of advertising.

Morning overview and early post-lunch takeaways

The audience is much smaller now that the trade show is closed, but it is still a very large number of people. My perosnal estimate would be a bit over 1000 people who have stayed for the full conference program. It is a bit difficult to estimate as post-keynotes the talks are spread across at least four separate rooms (and multiple other conferences are being help in the small spaces throughout the Hilton meeting spaces.

All afternoon as one session let out a line formed to get into the next session, on the one hand a sign of slightly cramped spaces and challenging logistics, but also a sign that the topics have been resonating with the audience. On one panel this afternoon they asked how many people in the room were from agencies, in a room of probably 500 or so people, about 30-40 people raised their hands.

However after the keynotes this morning the sessions seem to have been diminishing in energy levels as the day has worn on. I don’t know precisely why I have this perception, some combination I suspect of spaces which are indoors and windowless, with ample white noise in the background, slightly dimmed lights, and too many speakers talking in mostly a monotone voice. There is a marked difference between the speakers who talk while standing - and the panels which so far have mostly been with speakers seated, behind a table on which they can (and sometimes do) lean down, shoulders rounding.

I am going to skip the final panel this afternoon and instead head out to a dinner here in NYC. At the dinner will be many people who are attending Ad:Tech, but also people who are in town for some of the many other conferences happening this week here in NYC. Though so far at least little news has been made here today - certainly this week will go down as an important week in the digital advertising world.

Shannon Clark is a founding partner at Nearness Function, a new ad network for the publishers of dynamic content which will launch in a few months. He is the organizer of MeshForum - an annual conference on the study of networks and the one day MeshWalk series of walking conferences. He has been blogging for many years at Searching for the Moon where he covers technology, economics, food, and the life of an entrepreneur. His first server on the Internet was in 1991, he started his first company in 2000 after many years working as a technology consultant.

Source:CenterNetworks -

I am very excited to announce the launch of a new NY-based video series all about New York technology companies and the people behind them. The show is called nextNYers and builds on the concept of nextNY which is an awesome tech networking group founded by Charlie O’Donnell.

The show is produced by For Your Imagination, an online show production house in NYC. And I am very excited to share that CenterNetworks is partnering with FYI on the show. I have spent a good bit of time learning about the team at For Your Imagination (the CN mxer was held in their studio) and think this is a great chance to show off what we do here on the east coast.

Check out coverage of the series launch on TechCrunch and Silicon Alley Insider. 

Hosting the show is actress Meghan Mitchell and the first profile is with Magnify.net CEO Steve Rosenbaum and is embedded below. If you are interested in participating in nextNYers, send me an email.

Source:CenterNetworks -

We have covered Pingdom several times on CenterNetworks. It’s a service I use on all of my sites to monitor uptime. I like the alerts via email and mobile when one of my sites is down. One key I have learned is to use a separate email that is not on the domain you are monitoring. Otherwise you might not get the email alerts when it’s down. I like what Pingdom is doing with their blog - they provide lots of stats on the big sites and the industry as a whole. To find out more about Pingdom, I spoke with CEO Sam Nurmi and our discussion is below. Pingdom has been kind enough to provide us with a discount code for CN readers, will be posted this evening.

Allen: Can you provide a brief bio about yourself?

Sam: I’m a Swedish, dyslectic 30-year-old of Finnish descent. I’ve loved all kinds of problem-solving ever since I was a kid, and I’ve always been very interested in what makes businesses tick and how to expand on those ideas. I feel that I was destined to become an entrepreneur from an early age.

I’m currently running my fourth business, Pingdom, which is an uptime monitoring service. Previous companies include Loopia, which I founded and grew to the largest web hosting company in Sweden before I sold it in mid 2005. At that time, Loopia had 30% of the Swedish domain and hosting market. I also founded Troxo, a software development company that focuses on web-related software.

These days my focus is 100% on Pingdom, which we intend to grow into a market leader.

Allen: What’s Pingdom?

Sam: Pingdom is a service that monitors the uptime and response time of websites , servers or any other device that is and should be accessible over the internet.

Allen: How does the service work?

Sam: Our service is a web-based tool that gives webmasters and other administrators of servers or web services an easy way to get detailed monitoring from our global network of monitoring servers. The monitoring from Pingdom will detect if websites, servers or online applications are having problems or are unreachable.

If we detect any problems, our customers are notified via SMS or email. They can also examine their historical monitoring statistics, which is very useful for noticing trends and locating errors.

Allen: Why do I need a service such as Pingdom? Doesn’t my ISP provide this?

Sam: There are a lot of reasons to use an external, third-party monitoring service like Pingdom. For one, you can’t always trust your hosting provider or ISP to inform you when they are having issues. Another is that an ISP will usually focus on the network, and there are a lot of other things that can go wrong with your website or web service that is outside of their control. For example, imagine you have uploaded changes to your website that breaks it, or makes it extremely slow. Your ISP will not notice this. It is your responsibility.

Allen: How reliable is your service?

Sam: It’s very reliable. We have built in redundancy in all critical parts of our monitoring network.

Allen: What does the Pingdom team look like?

Sam: We’re a team of nine workaholics. Three guys here in Sweden who manage marketing and customer care, and six in Serbia who handle development and manage our infrastructure.

Allen: Who are your competitors?

Sam: Our industry is quite young and is still being shaped, so there is a good deal of difference between various uptime monitoring services, both in packaging and pricing. This makes it somewhat difficult to compare services. Feature-wise, I think we are aiming to be a hybrid between WebSitePulse.com and Alertsite.com. I’d like to think that we will be the ones to create a standard and shape the future of the uptime monitoring industry.

Allen: How do you monetize Pingdom?

Sam: Our business model is simple. We are offering an affordable, easy-to-use service that is in high demand. Our infrastructure was designed from the start to be able to handle a very large amount of users and still provide a high quality of service. In other words, we have a lot of users who pay less, rather than a few users who pay a lot. This has allowed us to establish ourselves as one of the fastest-growing uptime monitoring services today.

Allen: Can you provide some stats about who is currently using your service, large/small, usa/elsewhere, etc?

Sam: Last time we checked, we had customers in 127 countries. About one third of our users are located in the US and a similar portion in Europe.

We have a wide spread of "customer types". Some are large corporations, all the way down to individuals, for example bloggers. Examples of companies using our services are Alexa.com, FeedBurner, Foot Locker, Mosso, iStockPhoto and Canonical.

Allen: Do you find being located in Sweden and not Silicon Valley to help or hurt in buzz creation and grassroots marketing?

Sam: Actually, most of our customers don’t seem to realize that we’re Swedish. At least not right away. Even if they did, I don’t really see it as a problem.

The only negative thing I can think of right now, and this has more to do with being outside the US than Silicon Valley, is the time zone issue. We are six hours ahead of EST and nine hours ahead of PST, which can sometimes make it a bit difficult when you want to have meetings and the like with companies (or press) in the US. You get this time shift which can sometimes be awkward to deal with. We have also had to extend our business hours so that we cover daytime in the US as well as in Europe.

Allen: Can you provide some of the elements of your marketing plan?

Sam: We have a three-year plan that we are following, but of course it needs to be adapted along the way. It’s impossible to predict every twist and turn of the market that far ahead.

A key point that we try to apply to all our marketing efforts is that we should always get more than our competitors out of the money we spend on marketing. If we can get more effect for the same amount of money (not necessarily spent on the same things), this will give us an advantage. We try to be clever rather than just going for brute-force traditional marketing, though that has its place as well.

Allen: What’s coming next from Pingdom?

Sam: Pingdom is in a state of constant development. For example, we just launched a new monitoring package that is specifically aimed at larger businesses and web hosting companies.

We keep working on making the service as useful and user friendly as possible, and are currently developing several very nice features that will be showing up quite soon. They’re still kind of a secret, though. I’ll let you know once we are there.

Allen: What are the most important things that a startup must have to be successful?

Sam: If you ask me, the most important thing is to surround yourself with the right kind of people. As long as you’re working with creative, hardworking and determined people who can really deliver, the rest tends to resolve itself.

Allen: Which feeds are you reading these days?

Sam: I’m all over the place.

Thanks Sam for spending some time with us today!

Pingdom has run a variety of interesting marketing campaigns since they launched earlier this year. Their latest might be the most interesting yet! Error pages have become the talk of the town with Smashing Magazine posting a variety of fun, festive and interesting 404 pages. I have also seen 404 pages used as marketing tactics such as "Couldn’t find dog, have you considered a cat".

Now Pingdom jumps into the 404 mania by creating a homepage that is a 404. Check out the home page of Pingdom to view the campaign. Basically you get a large error message that says, "The normal price of Pingdom website monitoring is currently unavailable. Sign up now at a 50% discount or try again in a couple of days for full price." It works great for them because that’s what they do - they ping your page for uptime and 404s are a good way to detect potential downtime. It does appear they confused a few of their customers as they sent out an email noting that it’s just a marketing message and the home page is further down the page. Check out the campaign details on the Pingdom blog.

Check out our previous Pingdom coverage.