Ajax Among the Top 100 US Sites

Dietrich Kappe, Monday, December 11, 2006 @ 6:00 am

With the announcement that Sourceforge had settled on JQuery as its framework of choice, I thought it would be useful to see what all of the big US sites (as defined by Alexa) were doing with regard to Ajax. I'm not sure whether the results should surprise me, but it turns out most of these sites weren't doing Ajax, and even fewer were making use of frameworks. Here is the tally:

• Use of Ajax: 15%
• Prototype: 7%
• Scriptaculous: 3%
• JQuery: 2%
• moo.fx: 1%
• YUI: 1%
• GWT: 1%

With the exception of Google and Yahoo, there's not that much heavy Ajax going on. I'll have some more results later in the week as I dig further into the data, but I think some basic patterns are emerging:

1. The big sites are very conservative. With the exception of folks like Google, Yahoo, and Digg, most of the top 100 US sites are not originally startups that burst onto the scene through innovation. Most of them are the online extensions of offline companies. As such they are not technology companies and are followers when it comes to new technology.
2. The photo sites are really ASP's (or SaaS, depending on what acronym you prefer), and are competing on usability, thus, as predicted in 10 Business Reasons to Use AJAX, are among the early adopters of Ajax.

Don't hold your breath for many of these "common carriers" to make widespread use of Ajax any time soon. When you're CNN and a large part of your audience stull uses IE5, you have to move slowly.

Disclaimer: many of these top sites are big and/or have many subsidiary properties. It is entirely possible that I have missed the use of Ajax or an Ajax framework among the broad reach of microsoft.com or msn.com.

 
  Technorati : ajax, analysis

Related posts:

1. “Ajax overhaul, Part 4: Retrofit existing sites with jQuery and Ajax forms” now live at IBM developerWorks
2. “Ajax Overhaul, Part 3: Retrofit existing sites with jQuery, Ajax tabs, and photo carousels” Up on IBM Developerworks
3. Max Does it Again – 50 Great AJAX Reference Sites
4. The Business of Ajax – Google’s Ajax Search API
5. Saturday Roundup of New and Noteworthy Ajax Sites

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1. 

   In my opinion sites like Digg take ages to load (even on dsl broadband),
   Brainfuel keeps hearing that Ajax has been overused.

   Comment by milo317, Tuesday, December 12, 2006 @ 9:55 am

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