But none of that matters if Bing doesn’t grow and find a way to compete with Google . So after a month, where are we? We knew that Bing was growing, but the numbers being released tonight tell a tale of success, as Bing is now the 13th most visited site on the web.

According to Compete.com, Bing was able to amass 49.57 million unique visitors in its first month as Microsoft’s official search engine. Bing’s traffic trumps that of Digg (38.96 million) Twitter (23 million), and CNN (28.54 million). We want to stress that this focuses on U.S. visitors, since Compete does not track international visits.

The problem is that all of those stats are quite misleading without attributing the fact that Microsoft’s previous search engine, Live.com, redirects directly to Bing.com.  If you look at the stats for Live.com, you’ll notice that prior to Bing.com it hit an apogee of around 100 million visitors per month.  In fact, I’d say that since traffic for Bing is “only” at around half of what Live.com was the month prior to its debut, its probably far too early to tell how popular it actually is.

Furthermore, when you take into consideration that MSN.com directly feeds into Bing (previously Live) at the top of its page (primo real estate if there ever was any), and that MSN.com is the default home page for millions of Internet Explorer home pages, its further reason to take it all with a grain of salt.

I think the jury’s out on how popular Bing is — and with all due respect to Ben Parr,  that jury’s only due in several months I’d say.

The fact that the content of said article has very little to do with how you (or anyone) could sell weed is sort of immaterial, but this also sticks to the third rule of link bait, which of course states that since the headline is 93% of the point, you can write about whatever you like thereafter since almost no one reads that.

Almost 8 months into its public launch, Pownce is looking like a bit of a lame duck.

Which is strange (or not).

On paper, Pownce seems like a better Twitter than Twitter, given that you can also share files (up to 100 MB in size), as well as embed photos, videos, or MP3′s.  Plus, it handles sharing links in a sleeker way, more dedicated way.  Oh, the mobile interface is kind of nice as well, and when compared against Twitter’s native mobile interface, it doth rocketh a teensiest harder.

What else does it have going for it?  How about a tight pedigree, with Kevin “I’ll Still Be A Dark Tipper After $200M, I swear!” Rose’s mark behind it.

So, why hasn’t it gotten the traction that Twitter has?  It’s been out of private beta since January, but according to public traffic estimates across the board, things have remained kind of flat.  In fact, even with Twitter’s outages, dropping of Twitter followers, and public cries of “I swear, THIS time, I’m dropping it!”, Pownce — or, other micro-messaging services — really haven’t seemed to make a dent into Twitter.

My best guess(es): a combination of first mover advantage plus network effects.  Business history is littered with the examples of lesser products hauling marketing share over products that seem brilliant and better; in this case, Twitter *defined* what micro-messaging services was, captured the imagination of early adopters, exploded at SXSW 2007, and remained challengerless while those early adopters “figured” out how Twitter was useful (Twitter not as a life-streaming service per se, but more of a stateless hive mind, where you can have one-to-many interactions seemlessly).

And by the time they *did*, it was really too late, because far too many people were on Twitter to begin with.  Changing services would be monumental, and convincing others to use it would be a colossal pain in the ass.

Merely *being* better, as in Pownce’s case, can’t be enough.

And having that built in audience is just as surely saving Twitter’s bacon time, after time, after time.

How could services like Pownce (and Plurk, for that matter), grow their audiences?  Its hard to know.  There’s really only one Web 2.0 company that seems to be thriving, in spite of having features that seem to follow the leader: Mixx.

Mixx will never out-digg Digg, but because of industry connections, they’ve been able to convince mainstream media outlets to put their little “Mixx” it button on their sites, creating the impression, anyway, that they’re on equal footing with Digg (and Propeller, for that matter).

Bottom line?

An upward ticking graph that makes everyone happy.  Sure, you’d think the traffic would go through the roof with inbound traffic from the New York Times, CNN and USA Today, but at least its up.

Unlike Pownce.

In fact, in March, Richard MacManus detailed the kind of traffic-licious bounty that many “mainstream” blogs were enjoying thanks to getting Buzzed. 

*  Salon.com reached over 1 million uniques in one day for the first time in the company’s 12-year history, after Yahoo.com linked to one of their highly “buzzed” stories (they issued this press release)

· US Magazine: In part due to a Yahoo.com link, February 27th was the second highest day in overall Usmagazine.com traffic since its launch in June 2006. Referral visits from the Yahoo! homepage accounted for 32% of total visits that day.

· When Yahoo.com linked to one of their stories, The Smoking Gun received approximately 1 million additional page views over their average traffic, with over 275,000 visitors coming from the Yahoo! homepage.

· Portfolio.com (part of Conde Net) received over half a million referral visits from a Yahoo.com “Buzzing Now” link.

· HuffingtonPost received over 800,000 unique visitors from Yahoo.com in one day.

To other fans of social media, however, the *real* interesting metric wasn’t just the raw levels of hot unadulterated traffic, but also the level of the *engagement* of such traffic.  After all, its been argued (by me) that without engagement, social technologies that push traffic are somewhat questionable in their legitimacy *as* a “social” tool (cough, cough MIXX HAS AN ANEMIC NUMBER OF COMMENTS cough, cough).

To wit, Om says that not only did they get 200,000 additional page views, but that they got over 300 extra comments (!)  This is completely inline with TechCrunch’s experience when they got Buzzed earlier in the year, when they got over 1000 comments on the slowest day of the week, and an almost crippling level of traffic (luckily MediaTemple was girded real strong).

So is is Yahoo Buzz’s strength a new story?  Not really.  But I think its an important one to remember in the social news drama, and particularly every time we think / hear about Digg getting acquired.  By some numbers, for example, Yahoo’s Buzz eclipsed Digg *months* ago in terms of raw traffic it gets.

Perhaps the reason why it never gets as much “buzz” as Digg got is because — as far as I can tell — not just anyone can be included in Yahoo Buzz.  You might get a chance to vote or Buzz up a story … but unlike Digg, or Reddit, or Delicious, or StumbleUpon, users *don’t* get a chance to submit stories — i.e. submit their *own* blogs.

My understanding is that this may change this summer, as people who purchase ads with Yahoo might get a chance to get their stories Buzz’d. 

And if *THAT* gets to happen, you start wondering a) why kind of rush there’ll be to start using Yahoo’s ad service b) if Google would ever consider that for Google Adwords c) if that would dilute Yahoo Buzz’s appeal (or increase it) and d) what implications, if any, it would have for other social news sites.

There are a few (tech) blogging topics that are eternal. Comments vs. no comment.  A-listers vs. non-A-listers.  Techmeme sucks vs. Techmeme is still teh hot.  Also, for those in social media: Digg is pwned by a small number of diggers.

Yes, in a bit of unverified research that would have fit in the tech scene in 2006, popFail has “dugg up” (sorry, couldn’t help myself) some data that confirms what Digg management has furiously tried to avoid over several iterations — that a few individuals pretty much own the front page of Digg (specifically, 10 users have submitted over 30% of front page views).

In Digg’s own defence, those that make up that top 10 are quite different than what I remember in the past, so perhaps its efforts at “democratizing” digg has had some effect (although perhaps not in the way it was originally intended).

At any rate, I’m not sure if this “problem” will ever really be solved, as there will clearly *always* be a hierarchy of activity on social media sites, and there will, for any given activity, and there will likely be some kind of unequal power / logarithmic distribution of said activity.

That is, folks at the top are probably *WAY* at the top in terms of activity, “friends”, or whatever metric you’d like to choose.

If that’s the case, there might be algorithmic ways to change smaller details around it, but if this is indeed the nature of the beast, then there will *always* be diggers (or reditters, or mixxers, or propellers) that are more active than others, and always at the top of any “list”.