For all of their surging traffic, a lot of blogging, social networking, community and other Web 2.0 sites truly fail at keeping people on their site in the most basic way - by pointing people to related content within their walls. I can't understand why they're letting this traffic evaporate. The technology has been around for ages.
Amazon.com was one of the first sites I can remember that would point people toward relevant pages. Smart move. This keeps me shopping and often gets me to add another item or two to my shopping cart. They also point you to their advertisers in a very overt way.
Some of the big Web 2.0 properties do a nice job here. YouTube and Google Video in particular are standouts. Each provides numerous links to related videos. However, these links are based on content metadata and not on the viewing habits of people who watched the same video. Sites like Flickr, del.icio.us and digg don't have any of these features. And the major blogging platforms don't either. That's traffic they could have for the asking.
Google and AOL are also integrating links to "people like me content" inside their respective platforms. This is definitely a feature that will become more common place in the near future.
On Google, each widget listed in the Google Personalized Home Page directory, points you to other related widgets people also have on their home page. For example, here's a list of widgets that users have alongside the Official Google Mini Search Gadget.
America Online's "My AOL" feed reader recently added a similar feature called People Like Me Content. They monitor what links people click and then serve up additional content that might be of interest. Further, all of this value-added content is stored in your history file. With all of the data that Google is capturing in their RSS reader, one hopes they would add a similar tool perhaps through clustering.
This seems like such a no brainer for sites that are so hungry for traffic. Why pass up the traffic?
