As you can see, Compete shows Wolfram Alpha's traffic has plummeted in June. But the worse news is: it never got very high in the first place. It's hard to find a comparison for such n unique tool, but comparing it to Ask.com - a relatively minor player in the search game - reveals that it's simply not in the same league.
Part of Wolfram Alpha's problem could be its versatility. Before, when you needed to find out how much your daily calorie intake should be, you'd probably type "calorie calculator" into Google, and you'd get some specific tool that does that. Now, Wolfram Alpha does that and a zillion other things, but did you remember to use it, or did you just Google for whatever you needed like before?
In any case, Wolfram Alpha will remain useful, it'll remain cool, and it'll remain a great tool for geeks, scientists and students. But will it justify the immense buzz it got? I doubt it.
Moving on to our old friend Twitter, which stagnated in May, the numbers are once again looking good for the still-not-profitable-but-growing-fast startup. According to Compete, it is now at 23 million unique visitors, growing a solid 16.57% compared to May. I'm looking forward to next month's numbers, but with all the buzz still surrounding the service, I'm positive that Twitter still has a lot of room for growth and that last month's stagnation was just a temporary glitch.
Facebook has continued growing at its unrelenting pace, increasing 8.45% to 122,5 million uniques, and its biggest competitor, MySpace, has also grown a solid 7.19%, climbing back to nearly 61 million uniques. MySpace's traffic has been falling since the beginning of the year, but the latest numbers show the old giant (how quickly things become "old" on the Internet) still may be capable of learning some new tricks.
To finish this month's analysis, I've decided to look at three major social networks we hear less and less about: Google's Orkut.com, Bebo.com and hi5.com.
Their numbers can be summed up with one word: disaster. Orkut is growing, but it's way too small to make an impact; Bebo and hi5's traffic is disappearing quickly, presumably as their users are moving on to Facebook. Save for a complete change in strategy from some of these, now comparably small competitors, I'm afraid that, when it comes to (mainstream) social networking, it's all about Facebook (and, possibly, MySpace) now.