When I first started to become more heavily intersted and involved in the Internet and Internet technologies, Alexa was one of the sites that I latched on to. The site provided a reasonable, free way of gauging the success of a site, and I definitely didn’t have the resources to call on the services of Hitwise or ComScore, and it’s difficult to find other people publishing the specific information/data needed. Being based on a user-installed toolbar, it’s not a perfect science, but more of a guideline, like the Pirate’s Code (made famous by Disney’s Pirates of the Carribean).

When the site released their API, one of the most popular offsprings was Alexaholic. The site has been changed and forwarded to Statsaholic, due to pressure from Alexa (and parent company Amazon). The overhaul of the Alexa data that created Alexaholic was a slap in the face of the 90’s offering that had remained unchanged, and it was a perfect example of the new Internet and what was possible. Alexa has since adopted many of the features of Alexaholic (something I’ve suggested as a fundamental reason for creating API’s in the first place), and now as opted to block the use of their graphs by other sites.

This is an obvious example of a major corporation missing the boat on an opportunity, and finding no way to recover, has to shut the competition down. It’s understandable to a degree; it is their data, and they should be reaping the benefits of the traffic and corresponding funds, not alexastatsaholic or whatever the site is branded as. This could also be a sign of things to come, and anyone who has based their business on Google, MySpace, YouTube, their corresponding API’s, or any other site and their API’s should take this as an important warning. If these mega-sites see something they like, they have the power to take it away from you, and the only hope is that users, theirs and yours, f-alex their muscles back. In the new Internet, the users have a vote that counts.

UPDATE: Michael Arrington of TechCrunch fame weighed in on this here. I will try and keep up with this and provide links to any updates that become available.

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