With ever more hype surrounding companies that manage to position themselves in the Web 2.0 orbit its really interesting to look at Seth Godin's Web 2.0 Traffic Watch List on alexaholic to get a feel for which companies are generating real traction with consumers. The list ranks sites that "let people collaborate and share information online in a new way" by the traffic they generate.
There is no great surprise that MySpace, eBay and YouTube top the list but looking more generally at the top 50 it struck me that many, if not most, of these sites are using web technology to enable five fundamental human behaviors: to connect, to control, to create, to customise and to collaborate.
Of course its just coincidence ;-) that they all happen to begin with 'c' but let me be a bit more specific by providing some examples:
Connect: MySpace, Skpe
Control: Digg, BitTorrent
Create: YouTube, Flickr
Customise: Netvibes, Pandora
Collaborate: Wikepedia, del.icio.us
There are undoubtedly many different ways to categorise Web 2.0 companies but looking it at from the perspective of human behavior reminds us that while much of the attention is focused on the technology ultimately success is more often than not determined by meeting an underlying consumer need.
