14 DAY TRIAL // Google is now a huge company with several dozen big products. Yet, it's struggling to maintain some of the things that people loved about it when it was a wee stratup. One aspect has been the way it chose to communicate with its customers and users, blogging, giving it a more human face while also showing that its eager to 'eat its own dogfood' by using Blogger, the company's blog hosting platform. As 2009 came to a close, Google has taken a moment to look back on the year, as many have around this time, and to give itself a little pat on the back for five years of blogging.
"You may have noticed 2009 marked our fifth year here on the Official Google Blog — our first post was in April 2004 — and it was our busiest year yet. This is our 423rd post of 2009 — a 15 percent increase over last year. We're also pleased to note that a total of 14,493,472 readers stopped by this year, a 21 percent increase. You hail from all over: more than half of visitors are outside of the U.S," Emily Wood and Jordan Newman, editors from Google Blog Team wrote.
Not too shabby for the multi-billion dollar company, with almost 15 million readers, it would be quite a powerful blog in its own right. While the number of posts may have increased significantly, a relatively small number of posts counted for much of the traffic. Unsurprisingly, the most popular posts were the biggest news coming from the Mountain View-based company this year.
At number one, with a huge lead and making up more than 12 percent of the blog's entire traffic, came the initial announcement that Google was working on its very own operating system for PCs Chrome OS. The post went on to get almost 2.6 million unique page views four times as many as the runner up.
Google Wave caused quite a sensation when it was first announced, though when Google finally opened it up to a wider audience, it was somewhat of a let down. The announcement brought in almost 640,000 people to the blog. The third most popular post was the announcement of Google Voice, arguably one of the biggest new products from the company, one that still hasn't been released to the public.
The entire top ten is available on the Google Blog. Perhaps even more interesting, though, was just how much Google has embraced Twitter. It started using the service in February and since then has tweeted more than 1,000 times. The account has about two million followers at this point putting it in some very select company. What's more, Google has since expanded to have more than 75 official accounts associated with the company and its products. And to make it clear just how much Google loves Twitter, it also revealed that the microblogging platform was the biggest third-party referral source for the blog behind only Google sources.