Thanks to Twitter, I noticed that Thomas Hawk was messing around with a new Firefox add-on called Sparky.
It pops a cool little Alexa status bar in the bottom-right of the browser. It’s a nice way to get a quick feel for how popular a site is (if you trust Alexa, that is). I wonder if Compete is going to release a tool like this soon? (Their toolbar is the most annoying thing ever.)
Here’s a quick overview of Sparky (stolen from Alexa’s site):
Traffic Trend
Sparky’s trendline feature allows you to track a website’s popularity over time, plotting the traffic rank for the last 4 months on a handy little sparkline.
Reach Meter and Traffic Rank
Sparky’s reach and rank features give you a quick overview of a site’s popularity. The blue bar gives you an overall indicator - is this site popular or not? The rank number tells you exactly how this site ranks in comparison to all other sites on the Web.
Related Links
Sparky also comes with Alexa’s famous patented Related Links feature built right into the browser. Now, no matter what site you are on, Sparky can help you find similar sites.
Click Menu
With a click on Sparky you have immediate access to a wealth of additional information. Do a search for the site, find sites that link to it, see who owns it, where it is located, related links and much much more.
Damian
July 28th, 2007 at 8:59 am
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Hi Ryan,
Cool status bar; although only as useful as the underlying data. Have you checked out Quantcast yet? Get your web properties on the free quantified program for accurate real-time demographics and reach figures. http://www.quantcast.com/quantified-publisher.jsp
Cheers,
Damian
Entreprenews of the Week -- Young Go Getter
July 29th, 2007 at 9:33 pm
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[…] Enjoying Sparky - The new Alexa Firefox Add-on Stick this one next to your PageRank, Adsense, SEO, and Gmail notifiers in Firefox, and you’ll have the ultimate toolbox for web geeks. […]
Stefson
July 30th, 2007 at 8:04 am
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Looks like a usefull tool, goign to check it out. Thanks for the heads up Carson.
Caroline
July 30th, 2007 at 12:45 pm
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Hi Ryan,
Thanks for the info, although I might have come across some conflict within the firefox extensions. As soon as I installed it onto version 2.0.0.5, I couldn’t open firefox up again.
Thought it might be worth sharing with anyone that may have come across a similar problem.
lukeMV
July 30th, 2007 at 8:02 pm
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That’s great…although, I would be afraid of the flatliner every time I visited my site.
The Rock ‘n’ Ro Show » Blog Archive » Entreprenews of the Week
August 31st, 2007 at 12:44 am
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[…] Enjoying Sparky - The new Alexa Firefox Add-on Stick this one next to your PageRank, Adsense, SEO, and Gmail notifiers in Firefox, and you’ll have the ultimate toolbox for web geeks. […]