A new technology profiling web application from Australia, BuiltWith.com, launched today. BuiltWith.com is an interesting site that reveals the behind the scenes technology that powers any web site. Unlike statistics websites, such Popuri, BuiltWith.com is not concerned with how many visits a page gets or its Google PageRank (though it does include very rudimentary statistics estimates from Compete).
Instead, it peers under the hood to see what sort of technology is being used in the creation and delivery of the web site. “BuiltWith.com’s goal is to help developers, researchers and designers find out what technologies pages are using which may help them to decide what technologies to implement themselves,” says founder Gary Brewer.
BuiltWith.com breaks stats down into 10 categories: Analytics and Tracking (i.e., Google Analytics), Widgets (i.e., Sphere), Frameworks (i.e., PHP), Publishing (i.e., WordPress), Content Delivery Networks (i.e., Akamai), Advertising (i.e., FM Publishing), Aggregation Functionality (i.e., RSS), Document Information (i.e., XHTML Transitional), and Encoding (i.e., UTF-8), as well as a general “Site Information” category that reports the variety of web server software a site is using among other things.
The site also keep tracks of how many other sites use each technology. As more web sites are profiled using BuiltWith.com, those stats might become more useful. For example, the profile of Read/WriteWeb reveals that 37.73% sites use PHP as well, while just 6.2% of sites looked at so far include Digg buttons.
BuiltWith.com plans to make money via donations and from “featured” technologies, sold ad spots that would allow a widget provider, for example, to be featured on the page. Because the site is collecting stats on how many pages use each technology, it would be great to see pages for each with metrics over time (including the total number of sites in the database) and links to top sites using that tech.
