Well, I asked John, Xanga CEO-type, to comment on my last blog about spambots and he never did.  But either 1) I did Xanga a public service by bringing this to the attention of someone on the XangaTeam, or 2) like I have often been, I was ahead of the curve on the spambot insight.  Why ahead?  Because if Xanga were my sandbox, I would have had the spammers blocked a few days after my last post rather, as is seen above, months later.  Still, I have to credit John and the XangaTeam for this move.  Surely, blocking these spammers will significantly decrease Xanga's traffic ratings - a stat very obvious to advertisers looking to Xanga as a prospective platform.  By the way, while some of the spammers seemed to have slowed down, the most prolific, alexhormand.xanga.com is still running amok though not showing up on RecentUpdates. 

In any case, even as Xanga fades, I'll look ahead for it as I can.  After all, my goal is to post the very last post on Xanga before the book is closed. 

Back to what's happening...

Xanga traffic stats, it appears, are converging with Habbo.com for oblivion. Habbo who?  (Don't be Xangacentric, peeps on Habbo probably respond 'Xanga who?' , too.)

You can see the converging similarities here: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/xanga.com+habbo.com

Also, another good index of current popularity is not "online membership" the exaggerated claims for which can vary wildly, but online hits for news about the site.  Searching Google News for stories about various soical networking sites produces the following current hit list:

XANGA (not) in the news!

Of course, this lack of news presence for Xanga could rapidly swell to a peak if it were discovered that an Al-Qaeda plot to nuke New York was uncovered on obscure Xanga Private posts or if a cult of lemonade drinkers in the Carribean were all discovered murdered/suicided and each was wearing a Xanga T-shirt.    Ah, if only Xanga had actually opened that merchandise store it was exploring about 6 years ago!