Few minutes back I saw StumbleUpon down and displaying a HTTP error and after around 5-10 minutes break its back once again. Start Stumbling all over again.

Oops! This is weird? StumbleUpon is down? Did they give any prior notices?

I haven’t been too active on Twitter but recently started to tweet regularly (Follow Me) and since then I have discovered multiple twitter crazy web masters. @NischalShetty is one such twitter user who runs Twi5, a website dedicated entirely to twitter apps. It is a must visit for every twitter user (new or old) who wants to discover twitter apps that would make his tweeted life way more simpler and exciting. Twi5 has an alexa rank of around 75000 which is enough to explain the kind of traffic which this website is grabbing. I was surprised with the amount of twitter apps which this website has collected from around the Internet. People truly are twitter crazy!

Though Twi5 features some of the best apps collection yet I think there are many area in which Nischal needs to work. Let me jot down few of them:

• With 9000+ followers on twitter, Twi5 deserves a new and improved logo. 
• The word “Beta” in the current logo. Gmail was tagged as beta for many years and I guess that was the time when many of us learned what actually beta is! Unfortunately, the word ‘beta’ was overhyped and almost every website started to use it. Though the word beta won’t kick back any of the Twi5’s readers but I really don’t see any reason why every other website should use it. 
• Hey Twi5 has a blog too! But, i don’t see any mentions of the Twi5 blog on the Twi5 website? I came to know about this blog from Twi5 twitter page. Not every reader will digg down this much and henceforth most will never come to know about Twi5 blog. So, it needs a mention on Twi5.com’s homepage.
• Won’t it be great if the blog is integrated with the current website so that the traffic count of Twi5 website and “Twi5 blog on blogspot” merges? It will truly work as booster for Twi5. 

Lastly, a great website which needs few more touch ups from an experienced webmaster. By the way, where did you get that domain from?

P.S. This is NOT a paid review. Nischal wanted me to check his website and tell my readers about the same and I did so!

Although nothing is sure about the exact number of users that are using twitter yet the amount of traffic that these sites generate is something that we can study to estimate the popularity of StumbleUpon and Twitter. As per the latest traffic graph from Compete.com, StumbleUpon has something to cherish about. Though Twitter recently registered exponential growth in its traffic due to huge media response yet StumbleUpon.com has higher traffic when compared to www.twitter.com. Yeah! StumbleUpon.com beats www.twitter.com in terms of traffic but when compared to twitter.com then  the story is totally different. One must remember that Twitter URL redirects to a non-www URL which is shown in the image below.

This means if you type www.twitter.com in your browser then www is omitted and twitter.com is loaded. On the other hand StumbleUpon uses www with its domain which means if you type stumbleupon.com into your browser then it will load www.stumbleupon.com as shown in image below.

This simply means that the real URL that Twitter is using for their service is twitter.com while for StumbleUpon it is www.stumbleupon.com. Hence, these two must be compared and other data (the one pointed above) is for SU to boast about itself!

Let the statistics do the talking. There are more than 1.1 billion Internet users (which includes me!), around 3 billion mobile phone users, 1 billion of those use Internet messengers and emails and a third are busy on social networking websites like Orkut, MySpace and the latest to the directory – SecondLife.

Half of my classmates have Internet at there homes and they socialize after university hours on the Internet. And the ones who have no Internet access at homes also socialize on the Internet. How? They utilize the free time at our Institute and many a times even proudly bunk classes to check there scraps!

And what the heck do these social networking websites provide that glues the neitzens of today to there own 17” world? Linking up without there firewalls (our parents/elders in this case) knowing about it.

Still there has been a rage around the topic that too much of computers has actually made the youth of today forget there social life. They do not know what is happening around them but they know what is happening with there online friend sleeping in other part of the world!

But don’t you think the concept of social networking websites kills this very point? If a computer addict is glued to the Internet, it is not because of isolation. For many these websites are the only resource where they can socialize, make friends, express there thoughts, share content, and most importantly – communicate to the “like minded”

Think! People might create virtual identities at SecondLife saying they want to be someone else for sometime but the major reason is, they want to connect with more humans even though it is virtual!

Don’t you think I gave you a strong point which you can easily use to argue to your parents when they ask you not to be glued to your computer for hours?