Ron Hornbaker

Mike Arrington announces that TechCrunch is acquiring F****dCompany.com. This will be an interesting turnaround case to watch, since FC has had f’d traffic since its peak during Bubble 1.0:

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Statsaholic got covered by TechCrunch (again) this morning, and as usual, the comments are fun to follow. Take this one, for instance, by one of my idols in the tech world:

Paul Graham
March 30th, 2007 at 9:10 am
I think it’s time for Alexa to die. Their data was always dangerously misleading, and now they’re behaving evilly (in the Google sense) as well. If anyone wants to build a replacement for them, Y Combinator would be happy to fund it.

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[UPDATE - March 31: Alexa has modified their graph images so that if you turn off your referer headers as described here, you will see only the first domain in your list, even on their own site. This effectively prevents users who choose to conceal referers for privacy or any other reason from seeing the full functionality of their graphs. As more and more companies open up their systems to promote widespread use, Alexa seems to be doing all they can to close theirs down.]

It appears that Alexa has shut off their traffic graphs on all the websites of the world, with the exception of their own, Alexa.com. The sadly ironic part of this is that they’ve apparently broken their own widgets, too — all in an effort to shut down Statsaholic.

If you’re tired of seeing white boxes where the pretty graphs used to be, and you’d like to remedy the situation, all it takes is Firefox and a quick, easy, 10-second fix. Here’s what you do: (more…)

I guess I was wrong about Alexa… turns out they are willing to turn off their traffic graphs to the entire internet, with the exception of their own site. Statsaholic’s graphs disappeared a few minutes ago, around 6:00 pm Pacific, and no amount of referrer hacking will bring them back up. (more…)

First, the back story: I created Alexaholic.com (now Statsaholic.com - more on that later) over a long weekend in February 2006 for my own selfish purposes: I found the Alexa.com website to be slow and clunky, and I wanted faster access to their excellent traffic graphs. (more…)