Hey Sports fans, a quick update

So, you may have noticed a new category, "Sports" by popular demand :) Also, you might have noticed another category is gone...can you find it?

If not, no worries - people weren't using it anyway. Real Estate is now part of "home & garden" as it was our least popular category, and, well, home is where the heart is and real estate is a big part of home.

Before, if you were hesitating to ask a sports type question because you didn't know where to put it...well, go for it! Ask away, I know we have a bunch of sports fans on the site.

Google launches non profit portal, and I think we'll do something similar

Not 100% the same, of course, but working with non profits is a fantastic idea. Google is one of the companies I personally admire a lot for their philanthropic efforts, their "do no evil" philosophy, and their employee programs.

Of course, we don't have nearly the same level of resources, but we're planning on doing something for non profit organizations on FunAdvice. Why? Well, for one, it's the right thing to do - proactively getting involved in helping spread the message of companies who lack resources, are trying to improve the planet, society and the human condition just feels right.

As we get bigger, so too will our own philanthropic efforts go. I'd like to think that given a choice between various similar services, the one that will win (eg, be the biggest, generate the most revenue, etc) will be the one that does the most for the community.

Club Penguin, for example, was giving away 10% of it's profits to charities...they were making a mint by all accounts and didn't have to do that. However even when they negotiated & sold to Disney, they insisted that the donation program continue. That is applause worthy in my book, and something to aspire to. Even in the face of the biggest pay day for the Club Penguin team they might ever obtain they stuck to their principles and goals.

Bravo.

Once we get to where the entire team (not just two full time & two part time employees) can be supported by the FunAdvice business, we plan on doing even more. However, I'm excited that soon we'll be taking our first big step towards our amitious goal of helping worthy non profits reach people and raising awareness for their missions.

Amazon's Askville decides that SEO is the way to go

What else would you call this URL format?
http://askville.amazon.com/36329/SEOTopic.do?tag=electronics

:)

I rest my case.

Tags: askville, is it spam, or is it just good promotion?

Q&A Space: who's winning, who's losing, and why it matters

First, let me say that a picture is worth a thousand words:


Ok, that done, consider the following:
1) Sodahead = raised 4.25 million in Funding.
2) Yedda = raised 2.5 million, had 20 people on staff, and beat us out to get acquired by AOL last year for a rumored 15-20 million.
3) Wis.dm raised 5 million in funding.
4) Minti.com raised 1.5 million in funding.

So the average here is somewhere around a few million dollars to do...what, exactly? Our team is 7 people: 2 full time, 3 part time, and two "occassional" (aka, the other owners than me who help, but not on a regular, routine basis).

Is Mike Arrington listening? Nope. (and as an FYI, I did have a personal introduction email sent to him by his business parter, who copied me on it as well).

Do you here me, Pete Cashmore? Nope. And the number of times I've written (3) and commented (dozens) on their continued coverage of sites like these (above) that are doomed to failure, AND they continue to ignore us, when our business model is working & traffic, visitors, and engagement are all taking off...well, it's odd. :)

Did GigaOm want to say something? Nope, and I even had him on the phone for about a half hour. He still didn't give us the time of day in any of his write ups.

Why oh why is it that we get ignored? FunAdvice is in the top 5 Q&A sites in the world. We don't work together, all in the same office so between our virtual collaboration AND lack of investment capital, isn't it an amazing story? Yep.

Couple that with our commitment to making the world a better place, FunAdvice is a business like no other in our category. Every larger Q&A site is part of a publicly traded firm, OR larger parent co with hundreds of millions in investment capital.

Our story is unique, compelling and getting more interesting. However, if you want to read a story like this, you CAN'T read it at places like TechCrunch, Mashable, or GigaOM. G4: Attack of the Show even gave us some air time ;) A dozen or more radio stations have also given us some air time.

However, leading blogs & other print publications apparently believe we aren't press worthy. Sigh.

Quantcast agrees: we're at a million uniques a month

Of course, the real number for US uniques last month was 1.15 million, but I've noticed that QuantCast has gotten closer the bigger we've become.

http://www.quantcast.com/funadvice.com

Their estimate puts us at the 2,722 largest site in the US. Awesome. Well, we're even bigger than that (their estimates don't match their dashboard data, eg, they haven't updated the top site number list yet).

Ah, and for the 'bowl of cheese' guy, this is funadvice:
FunAdvice US. Click the link & off you go ;)

Pity: Compete hasn't updated their Feb data yet.

Quantcast's related sites feature: hi squidoo, 43things

I've been watching quantcast stats for a long time now. It's been amazing to see Seth Godin's site (he's a former Yahoo, like me, though far more famous) Squidoo do incredibly well. Not only that, but now, http://www.quantcast.com/squidoo.com - FunAdvice is the 3rd most related site in the discussion / chat category.

Personally, I feel flattered. Then looking at 43things, which launched around the same time as FunAdvice, but had a far more mature product at launch...well, take a look:
http://www.quantcast.com/43things.com we're the most related chat / discussion site there. Which makes sense, given the Squidoo comparison.

What does all this mean? Well for one, we're sharing customers. People who use 43things are using FunAdvice, and people on FunAdvice are using Squidoo, etc.

This means, for me, a few things that we need to keep in mind:
1) product impovements are a must - if it bugs me, odds are, it bugs a customer
2) if it bugs a customer and we don't fix it, we lose them AND we look like idiots - not cool.
3) bugs need to be fixed regularly, as there is always something broken, for somebody, somewhere.

:)

Welcome to 2008, Webmasterworld: adding the "quick reply"

I've been posting at Webmasterworld for nearly 8 years...wow.

And, we've been running funadvice for nearly five years. So, when I visited webmasterworld and saw the "quick reply" text box at the bottom of a discussion (something we've been doing for over a year on FunAdvice) I smiled :)

Welcome to 2008. People don't want to *work* to use a website. And WebmasterWorld is still about 3-5 times bigger than FunAdvice. However, we're growing faster. As they're run by professional webmasters with, combined, more experience than our small FunAdvice team, I must say I'm flattered that they took the concept & ran with it.

Continual improvement is hard. And, with any larger size site, you constantly find stuff that, once fixed, scratches an itch your members might not have even realized they had until you fixed the problem.

So, anything you see on FunAdvice today that bothers you? Let us know.

Why do we have a funadvice blog?

You tell me, if you read this: is it worthwhile for us to do this? Or not?

How does the Yahoo & Microsoft Offer affect sites like FunAdvice?

First, we should say that Microsoft has merely bidded for Yahoo. The whole landscape could change.

Most of the chatter in the blogosphere has been about the financial side of the deal. I have not yet read about the thing that could torpedo Yahoo if its taken over by Microsoft.

See, Yahoo is an open source company.

What does that mean? Yahoo depends on open source and open standards to run their business. Internally, Yahoo is more like Google than Microsoft in that regard. And if Microsoft takes over, it will affect startups like ours in a substantial way.

Yahoo has contributed so many programming tools, from Mapping to my favourite -- Content Analysis. There's also the Yahoo User Interface Library -- YUI including Yahoo Grids. And they've really taken accessible websites to heart and gave people who build startups a lot to ride on. Oh, and they've also use REST in a whole-hearted way, thus moving the industry in general away from the heavier and less intuitive SOAP.

Not to mention PHP, MySQL, OpenBSD, Linux, Qmail and tons of other things.

That's incredible stuff that I can't see Microsoft maintaining. Since all they want is the pageviews, and likely Panama. But Panama's not worth much itself. Microsoft already has ad serving technology which is arguably better than Yahoo's but still light years behind Google's Adwords and Adsense simple-as-pie-that-gets-your-ads-online-in-15-minutes technology.

If I were a programmer at Yahoo, I'd be looking to the exits at this point. Despite the economy, there are still tons of programmer jobs out there that are oriented towards PHP, Java and open source in general.

Can you see Microsoft keeping the open source ecosystem that Yahoo has built and shared with startups like FunAdvice? Would you create your new startup with ASP.net given the availability of free tools like PHP, Ruby on Rails, Python, PHP and other great open source technologies?

Check out:
http://developer.yahoo.com/
http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/

55K visitors on monday - we're thrilled

The reason this blog is seldom, if ever, updated is pretty simple: we're really busy. Case in point. Last month, we had 1.17 million visitors.

So far month to date for Jan, we've had 1.3 million, and on Monday, we had 55K visitors to the site. Thus the run rate for the month is 1.4 million, more than 20% above December (which was our previous record).

Thus any number of things change:
1) Gui needs constant tweaking (it can always improve)
2) "Minor" issues become bigger, faster, because of scale
3) Despite the team being larger than ever, and devoting more time to the site, there is simply too much going on for us to keep track of it all.

Though I'm very, very curious what'll happen in the next 6-12 weeks, mainly becuase for Jan, we'll finally be over 1 million US visitors for the month. A lot of the tracking services that people cite (comScore, Quantcast, Neilson, Compete, etc) leverage a US based panel, which means that despite having more than 1 million visitors a month since November, we've not shown up as a site with more than a million uniques becuase they aren't all in the US.

At least, until this month.

Looking back to January, 2007, we had 190K visitors for the month. That's a 736% increase over the last 12 months, which is great.

Tip for anybody who's ignoring us still in the media (yep, that'd be you, you, and most definitely, you):
fastest growing social sites a blog post I made after reading a list over at TC.

Given our growth rate & the knack panel based data has for being very wrong sometimes, I'll expect the reporting agencies to take another 6 months or so before we make such a list. :)

However, I'd have a ton more respect for all the mainstream bloggers if they didn't wait for flawed sample to give them an idea, and instead, actually report on the news as it happens.

Any bets on whether or not they finally notice us?