Well given that every few days someone or the other comes up with the “next big thing”, it seemed fitting to know what works and what doesn’t work nowadays; what people want, what is selling like hot cakes and what isn’t!The below is the list of the 7 hottest unacquired web startups and their stats as on April, 2008:

1. Facebook

ESTIMATED VALUATION: $15 billion
REASONING: $240 million investment from Microsoft at $15 billion valuation
Launched: February 2004
Founded by: Mark Zuckerberg
Type: Social Network
Traffic: 15 billion pageviews/month
Funding: $338 million

2. Slide

ESTIMATED VALUATION: $550 million
REASONING: Rumored valuation of last funding round (see VentureBeat)
Launched: August 2005
Founded by: Max Levchin
Type: Widgets
Traffic: 200 million+ widget installations, 20 million+ uniques/month (QuantCast)
Funding: $58 million

3. RockYou

ESTIMATED VALUATION: $400 million
REASONING: Rumoured valuation of rumoured Morgan Stanley investment (see BoomTown).
Launched: 2006
Founded by: Jia Chien & Lance Tokuda
Type: Widgets
Traffic: 180 million widget views, 7.5 million+ uniques/month (QuantCast)
Funding: $16.5 million

4. Digg

ESTIMATED VALUATION: $300 million
REASONING: Rumoured “asking” price (see our post, TechCrunch, and Valleywag)
Launched: December 2004
Founded by: Kevin Rose
Type: Social Bookmarking/Content Discovery
Traffic: 208 million pageviews/month (September 2007, Compete)
Funding: $11.3 million (Series A + Series B)

5. Twitter

ESTIMATED VALUATION: $100 million
REASONING: $20 million pre-money as of July 2007, inflating with market valuations and Twitter’s growth spurts since April 2007.
Launched: July 2006
Founded by: Obvious Inc.
Type: Micro-blogging/Social Network
Approximate Traffic: 1.2 million uniques/month (Comscore)
Funding: $4.8 million (Series B)

6. Mahalo

ESTIMATED VALUATION: $100 million
REASONING: Rumoured pre-valuation of last funding round (see PaidContent).
Launched: March 2007
Founded by: Jason Calacanis
Type: Search Engine
Traffic: 4.1 million uniques/month
Funding: $16 million

7. Technorati

ESTIMATED VALUATION: < $100 million
REASONING: Market position, traffic, growth, future prospects — and the fact that no blog player has yet exceeded a $100 million valuation.
Launched: January 2005
Founded by: Dave Sifry
Type: Blog Search Engine/Content Discovery
Traffic: 2.8 million unique visitors/month (Comscore)
Funding: $21.6 million (Series A, B, & C)

Original article By Sid Yadav April 4th, 2008