Web 2.0 bubble?

Bumped into this list from Seth Godin on Alexaholic that breaks out the top 'Web 2.0' companies ranked by traffic. A few thoughts. First, I'm glad Seth included eBay on the list :) Also, knowing a few of these companies fairly well, it's surprising to see how much activity and traffic is being generated by at least the top 100 sites. Take Grouper, recently acquired by Sony for $65MM. They stated they had north of 6 million users a couple months ago, but they're only 63rd on the list with Alexa rank of 2,979.

Before the days of Google, eBay, Yahoo and Myspace, 6 million users would have been fairly impressive :) Frankly, even today, any service that manages millions of customers has to be taken seriously. Given there's 61 companies with more traffic than Grouper on Seth's list (and no Alexa isn't perfect, but at least its directionally correct), the sheer amount of activity being driven by these sites collectively is nearly incomprehensible.

There are many comparisons of Web 2.0 to Web 1.0's bubble activity. Only a handful of Web 1.0 sites got even close to a million users, let alone multi-million. Something has dramatically shifted in how Joe Q is using the Internet, and for at least 100 Web 2.0 companies, crossing the chasm isn't an issue anymore...