When I started this blog I vowed not to look at the site statistics.  The logic was that I didn't want to be swayed into talking about things I didn't care about just to get more readers.  I wanted this blog to be an honest expression of my thoughts and I simply don't think I could do that if I were looking at numbers every 5 minutes. 

But lets be honest, if I never checked I'd very likely drive myself insane.  So I decided to take one day every 6 months or so and go over the numbers.  I'm a couple weeks late but its been about 6 months since I made this blog public (I had a couple months of private test run to make sure I'd stick to it) so this morning I undertook the task. 

Now that its done I have to say...its pretty terrifying.

Realistically I knew things were growing a little.  I'd been linked to by some prominent bloggers and I'd made it onto Techmeme a few times so I knew there were more than I began with but...well...I thought that meant like 30 people or so.

I honestly might have been more comfortable with 30 people in retrospect.

On that note, this seems to be as good a time as any to thank people for dropping by.  It sounds cheesy to say but it really is an honor and I'm profoundly grateful for every person who comes by and gives me a voice in their lives.  So thanks!

That said, I'll close with a few random observations

• Google Analytics and my web providers internal page counter deliver vastly different results.  Some of that is probably bots but its still surprising how different the numbers are.
• Compete.com only seems to pick up really obvious trends (e.g. 25,000 people visited his site this month so the line goes way up but it claims there were 11,000).  Other than that the numbers seem to be pretty inaccurate (though in fairness I don't get enough traffic to really rate with them)
• I rarely seem to answer the question being asked when people come here via search engine
• Google Reader, which I thought to be the biggest feed reader by far, only accounts for about a 10th of my total subscribers.
• Fred Wilson's right, people who do subscribe via RSS/Atom don't really click as much as you'd think
• On that note, I always thought RSS/Atom readers would be the majority of my traffic, they aren't. 
• Far more people seem to browse the Internet between 11pm and 4am than I ever would have thought
• More people seem to read blogs during their work hours than at any other time
• Reddit sends more traffic here than Digg (at least in my one experience with Digg)
• I've never seen traffic pick up and drop off as quickly as a StumbleUpon burst.  Often times every in-link from StumbleUpon will come in during one hour long spurt
• My web hosts traffic monitor doesn't show where each search phrase leads people but one of my posts ranks very high for the search terms "Pimpin It".  I don't think I've ever used those words before so I don't know why that is (and I've searched Google and can't find which post is doing it).
• The phrase "when they came my neighbor" is also popular
• Lots of people are trying to decide between the Blackberry Bold and the iPhone 3G
• The people of Oceania love me!
• I'm not a "top level" Techmeme person so it doesn't generate all that much traffic.  That said I have to say it doesn't really matter because I consider it the glue that holds the community together and I'm always honored to have my blog show up there.
• Even given that fact, Friendfeed generates far, far less traffic
• Technorati is just completely ineffective at this point.  It seems to pick up about half the links I get from my referral log
• For all the complaining, "Bitchmeme" topics draw more traffic than any serious tech topic.  Though my most popular post is a tech one in all fairness
• Today (the day I checked) seems to be the lowest traffic day I've had in over 4 months.  Coincidence or Government conspiracy designed to track my actions and adjust my traffic accordingly to give me an inaccurate impression of my traffic levels...you decide!
• There appears to be simply no way of telling what will and will not be popular
• Traffic levels are much lower than I thought in the tech blog world.  Either that or people just don't click on links because I've been linked to by several a-listers and, while they provided a nice traffic boost, it wasn't in the 10s of thousands like I thought it would be (I mean, if a site with 2 million unique visitors links to you it would seem that would draw more than a few hundred clicks)

I don't know that I can hold Jim Kukral's post entitled "The Death Of The A-List" against him since it did manage to get him to the top of Techmeme.  With that said I think it teaches a very important lesson about link baiting which is that, though it might appear to accomplish its goal, the end result is actually counter productive.

My topic really isn't his post but the thing to come away with is just how ridiculous it is.  Here's a quick quote....

The thing we like to call “the a-list” is fading away. In fact, I think it might be already dead. Guys like Scoble and Winer and Calacanis and Arrington, and the rest, well, someone stole their mojo and they’re trying really hard to get it back by grasping at straws by trying to build the hugest Friendfeed list, for example.

Yes Jim, Michael Arrington is talking to 1.4 million people each month while you are talking to about 24,000 and there's absolutely no difference between the two.  Keep telling yourself that. 

Anyway, the post actually devolves even further from there as he lays the "death" of the A-List at social networking and paints the web as one big Web 2.0 love fest where friendfeed makes blogger 8217986 just as powerful as Scoble or Calacanis. 

I'd honestly be surprised if he even believes what he's saying.

Which is my point.  Link baiting works in the short term.  It gets people to your door and makes them listen to you for one brief moment.  But if what you're saying is non-sense it ends up making people feel they've been tricked.  That in turn does the opposite of what you set out to do. 

It actually ends up driving traffic away.

Not to pick on Mr. Kukral, he seems like a good guy, but he's the perfect example of what I mean.   The fact that he claims to have been blogging since 2001 and still only has about 24,000 readers (according to compete.com)  kind of proves the point.  He obviously knows how to get people in the door but he's not earning their respect while they're there which means they don't stick around.

That, to me, is the ultimate indictment against the practice of link baiting. 

Please Note: I quote compete.com in a few places above and feel the need to point out those numbers are pretty inaccurate.  That said, I think they accurately represent levels (e.g. Arrington has a lot more readers than Krukal Kukral) which is the point I was making.

I've had a fairly iPhone deficient day.  A brief encounter with the Apple store not withstanding I really haven't focused on today's release.  The one article that did catch my eye was this one by Mashable entitled "How the iPhone App Store Will Kill iPhone Web Apps"

In it they come to this conclusion...

The end is finally here for the Web app. And I, for one, am happy to see it go.

I'm enjoying all the native apps as much as the next guy but I still see a very valid need for Web Apps.  In fact, I'd say applications that don't need the added functionality of a native environment are better off staying with the Web App.  Native applications should be the domain of applications that (a) need access to the iPhone's hardware (camera, graphic acceleration, etc...) or (b) need to use background services (such as IM clients and such)

Below I give several reasons why the iPhone Web App shouldn't and probably won't be going anywhere.

Early Adopters vs The Rest Of Us

I think its important to make a distinction between the mentality of the early adopter and that of the average consumer.  Early adopters go out of their way to look for what they can do with a device which includes spending tons of time going through the Apple App Store to see all the neat apps they can find.

The Average Consumer on the other hand is more likely to wait until they need something to go looking for it.  That makes "no install" a huge advantage in this arena.  Things like tip calculators or restaurant finders are probably better left on the Web where they can be accessed at a moments notice.

Web Apps Got Better too

One of the points the Mashable article makes is to say...

Apple was ostensibly under the impression that users wouldn’t mind using Safari to access applications and the lack of native software wouldn’t really matter. But after few people jumped on the bandwagon, it became abundantly clear that developers weren’t all that willing to jump on-board and more often than not, online applications were plagued with lag issues, few updates, and only simple games were available.

There's truth to that but I'd point out that many of the problems with iPhone Web Apps were related to painfully slow data speeds delivered by an Edge network.  I find most web apps are perfectly fine over WiFi. 

So 3G speeds are going to be a major plus for Web Apps in the future.

The Establishment comes knocking

Should the iPhone really take off in the corporate world the idea of "lowest possible development cost" is going to start coming into play.  That means trying to have as small a code base as possible which in turn makes developing web apps for your existing Intranet a lot easier than creating native apps.

Any serious business is probably going to be too enamored by the cost savings of web apps to even look at the native side of things. 

I Love Cocoa, You Love Cocoa, but Not Everybody Loves Cocoa

Somewhat related to the above point you have to remember there's a huge barrier of entry to iPhone development.  It literally requires you start over from scratch and learn Apple's custom development environment.  No Java, No C#, No Visual Basic, No Windows Development, No Linux Development, and no Flash development.  All your existing tools are useless to you.

If you want to develop for the iPhone and you aren't already an Apple developer you need to go out and buy yourself a Mac, get accustomed to that, load up XCode (the Mac Development tool), get accustomed to that, then start learning an entirely new programming language (Objective C) and get accustomed to that.  A language, I might add, that is only used by Apple.  So it isn't like you can decide to switch from Java to Objective C and do all your work in that from now on. 

For independent developers this is a tall fence to climb especially when they can use all their current tools to develop web apps for the iPhone. 

Understanding Branding

Back to the Mashable article for a second, they make this point...

On top of that, we can’t discount the fact that online apps are missing a key component: revenue models. Unlike the Web, Apple’s App store provides developers with the opportunity to sell applications at any price and effectively help them turn a profit on something that was making nothing online. On top of that, Apple will allow free apps to be ad-supported, meaning every developer has an opportunity to turn a profit regardless of the software’s price.

And although some may say that ads could help developers turn a profit online, the amount of people heading to online apps isn’t nearly high enough to do it.

True...but not really.

A large part of the Web App world is acting as an extension for a web page.  I had never in my life visited or even heard of Weatherbug.com until they were one of the first to have an iPhone web app.  Now I use their desktop site about once a day (where there are plenty of ads). 

Web Apps are easy to develop for those already maintaining a commercial web site so there isn't much of a barrier to entry and they act as free, virtually constant advertising for the larger brand. 

Bottom line: The Mashable logic makes the mistake of assuming iPhone apps exist in a vaccuum which they don't.

The Missing Fun

This last point is a very personal one but still valid.  Developing a deployable native app is, by Apple's design, hard.  They allow you to use the development environment to put it on your iPhone but to give it to anyone else you have to either get accepted into the Apple program and wait 6 months or register each iPhone using the software as one of your corporate computers.

That essentially locks out the hobbyist developer who sits at his PC for 8 hours on a Saturday, kicks out a neat little app and then sends it to all his friends.  That scenario is what makes being a hobbyist developer fun and that scenario isn't possible with native apps.  Web apps on the other hand are free game. 

I think people would be surprised at how many times the next cool thing gets developed by a hobbyist over a weekend.

Conclusion

Hopefully the above has made the point that there's still a very rich world available to iPhone Web Apps.  Don't get me wrong, native is great and I personally am using the SDK to develop applications that make use of the camera (which I couldn't do in a web app).  But that doesn't mean the end is near for the web app.

I think both types probably have a pretty bright future.