The pie chart indicates that only 15% of companies use CSS? That's clearly the wrong way to display this data. Very few of the technologies covered are mutually exclusive.
Top Technologies Used By YC Companies
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Re: Top Technologies Used By YC Companies
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
A couple reasons come to mind: - PHP might be the most practical choice for some of these companies. The founder or lead tech might be most proficient in PHP for real-world applications (even if he adores Python or Ruby). - PHP might be the language that everyone on the team knows so they choose it to keep everyone equally involved in the production of the site. - The people commenting on HN aren't necessarily people…
Ruby on Rails Token =~ Rails 3/whenever the csrf token was introduced? (2.3ish?)
Yeah, they're splitting hairs on the Ruby count (not sure why). But I'm assuming that at least the number of PHP installs is somewhat accurate which is still a good number of the sites. Once you add the two Ruby counts together it does win out over PHP (which is more in line with what people would expect from SV types).
Re: Top Technologies Used By YC Companies
#23What baffles me is how this site users themselves seem to dislike PHP a lot, yet it's the most used language of these companies... So why the hate?
Iirc, PHP still leads Python and Ruby in general, so the YC numbers merely reflect the greater programming language ecosystem.
Additionally, Facebook has made PHP scalable with the HipHop compiler and other open source tools, so that's no longer a major reason not to use it.
Re: Top Technologies Used By YC Companies
#24Interesting to see which companies are savvy enough to sign up for Google's free webmaster tools: http://trends.builtwith.com/tech-usage/Y-Combinator/Google-W... The list includes Dropbox, Scribd, WePay, OMGPOP, Loopt, and Weebly, but a lot of sites are missing out on potentially useful information--only 18% of 136 sites were detected as signed up with webmaster tools.
can't you verify with google analytics account now? the verification key isn't necessary right?
That's true. There's actually four ways to verify a site (meta tag, upload a file, DNS, or Google Analytics): http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...
Lots of people use the meta tag method though.
Re: Top Technologies Used By YC Companies
#25I thought it was very telling that out of the 136 companies surveyed, only 2 had a payment system. Speaks volumes about the sort of companies YC is trying to incubate/build.
I'm pretty sure that's just sites using paypal/google checkout, and not including other payment processing methods.
Re: Top Technologies Used By YC Companies
#26I wish that they had also shown what hosting they were using. That would have been the most interesting to me.
Re: Top Technologies Used By YC Companies
#27I wish that they had also shown what hosting they were using. That would have been the most interesting to me.
I think http://jpf.github.com/domain-profiler/ycombinator.html?2010 might be close to what you want?
Re: Top Technologies Used By YC Companies
#28I thought it was very telling that out of the 136 companies surveyed, only 2 had a payment system. Speaks volumes about the sort of companies YC is trying to incubate/build.
Only 2 were using a payment system that the reporting site tracks. That doesn't mean only two were accepting payments.
Notice that both that showed up were intrusive payment systems. What I mean by "intrusive" is that they take you away from the site you are shopping on to enter your payment and shipping information on the payment system site. My guess is that this is the only kind of system the reporting site detects, because you can find it by noting the links to the payment system site.
If a site were using a transparent system, where the payment and shipping information are posted back to their own server and they deal with it on their own backend, it probably would not show up.
For instance, if your cart checkout just posts back to your PHP or Ruby code, and that code uses Braintree's PHP or Ruby API to process the payment through Braintree, there is no way the reporting site is going to know that you are using Braintree. Same if you are using Merchant e-Solutions, PayPal's PayFlow Pro, or something similar.
Re: Top Technologies Used By YC Companies
#29Interesting information that I'm genuinely interested in but the execution and delivery leave me scratching my head. The operating system and web server graphs make no sense. mod_ssl? varnish? Makes me question what was asked and who was answering. I'd also contend pie charts aren't the best way to represent this information, especially in the categories where there are only a small number of responses.
Most likely all information was gathered automatically. According to their FAQ (on the right side of the page) they check the homepage and attempt to detect the presence of any of the listed technologies.
I agree pie charts are probably the worst way to visualise the statistics. For example, it gives no sense at all of the ubiquity of any technology.
Also the accuracy seems to be lacking. I was surprised by seeing their (automated) claim that only 85% of the sites use CSS. That seems strange since I can't actually remember having seen a site recently that doesn't use CSS on its homepage. Checking some of the unlisted sites confirmed my suspicion; they just failed to detect CSS on those pages.
Finally, these statistics only give insight into what is used on the home page of the given domain. The home page may just be part of a (separate) marketing website, so don't be fooled into thinking these statistics represent the products/services built by these companies.
Disregarding all the problems with these stats, it is indeed interesting to see a comprehensive list like this. I find their list of technology trends [1] even more interesting, though.
Re: Top Technologies Used By YC Companies
#30Interesting to see which companies are savvy enough to sign up for Google's free webmaster tools: http://trends.builtwith.com/tech-usage/Y-Combinator/Google-W... The list includes Dropbox, Scribd, WePay, OMGPOP, Loopt, and Weebly, but a lot of sites are missing out on potentially useful information--only 18% of 136 sites were detected as signed up with webmaster tools.
I used to sign up for webmaster tools but after a while I just didn't find the utility in it anymore. I'm able to control which domain Google sees as canonical (bare vs. www) without using webmaster tools. That was why I started using it in the first place. Though it's nice to see crawl errors or other potential issues.
From what I understand GA isn't showing search keywords now for users that are logged into their Google account (totally frustrating change as more of your users seem to be logged in now). Webmaster tools does kind of show this information but without any of the neat metrics that go along with a GA report.
I've also heard horror stories. There was an article (or possibly just a commenter) on here not too long ago that was describing how their position on the SERPs dropped dramatically just a week after signing up for webmaster tools. That kind of thing sticks with you, even if it's not true (and I do suspect there were other variables involved that he wasn't telling us).
So, it's not all about whether someone is savvy or not. ;)
Edit: Almost forgot! A killer feature of WT that I think no one should do without is that it shows you what pages on the web are linking to your site. I'd forgotten how awesome that is.