For the past two weeks, the market share of US Internet visits to Gmail has been higher than visits to YouTube. Previously, YouTube consistently ranked 10th among all websites by market share of visits until the week ending Jan. 10, 2009, where Gmail moved up one rank to reach #10. The websites have been swapping positions regularly ever since.

Google has been quietly rolling out social features across all of its services based on Gmail contacts. While Google still has to overcome some of its social tone-deafness (e.g. automatically adding contacts without asking), this move makes perfect sense. For people over 30 (and probably even over 25) email IS the social graph.

This is a post that I am guessing will get some fairly passionate responses on either side of the debate. Here's the question lots of people are asking today: where and how much does privacy really matter to you online? This is a critical question for 3 reasons:

Have you been getting a flurry in LinkedIn invitations in the past few months? I have been receiving a few requests a week, so I wasn't surprised to find that the market share of US visits to LinkedIn was up 323% in the past year (week ending 7/7/07 vs week ending 7/8/06), and up 17% in the past four weeks alone (week ending 7/7/07 vs week ending 6/8/07). As of last week, LinkedIn ranked at #23 in the Hitwise Employment and Training category.

On February 14, 2007 Google's Gmail opened up access to anyone worldwide. Previously Gmail, which is still in beta, was only available by invitation from another Gmail user. The market share of US visits to Gmail increased by 17% from February 2007 to April 2007, and was up 30% year over year, from April 2006 to April 2007.