320,000 visitors and 900,000 pageviews in March - thanks!

The title says it all. In March, FunAdvice received 320,000 unique visitors, and 900,000 pageviews. We'd like to thank everybody wrote about us and all the sites that have encouraged others to check us out, and most importantly, we'd like to thank our wonderful community, where anything is possible, questions get answered, problems get solved, and friends are made.

We think about the future a lot - and we have little time to execute as much as is on our minds about how to evolve the site. Time and again, we come up with "great idea number 542" or number 543, etc, and haven't had time to execute on it, becuase number one is still on the list and won't be built till next week.

One thing I've been thinking a lot about (and the implications for the direction of our unique site) is about adding value to members, and the idea of network effects.

If you check out the chart, borrowed from this amazing blog about communities it evokes some interesting thoughts, especially when you're heavily involved in community building. What we discussed yesterday, Ericson & I, was the idea of network effects, and how the value of the whole increases greater than the value of a single addition to the network, because of the increase in possible connections between the nodes.

So, I came up with an idea: the viral value of your site (if it's a community) is directly proportional to the immediate value that joining provides to your network. Eg, if I join FunAdvice today, all I'm asked for is interests, gender, email, and date of birth. I'm not required to add my interests, that's only on the thank you page, and only if you didn't ask or answer a question before you signed up. So, you might not even get the "thank you" page today.

However, what if when you sign up, you always get the "thank you" page, and a specific list of valueable actions you can take to deepen the experience with a minimal amount of effort? Then, your friends will get an even bigger value out of you joining the site, even if they never sign up themselves.

That's where we're headed.