Groups feature is now live!

My group isn't very interesting but does give you an idea of what the feature does. If you look at esconsult1's group you'll see some really cool pictures of Miami.

And so far, the most active group has been krazy_drama_queen's group which is just awesome.

What do you think about the feature? Easy to use, easy to get started? Later one, we'll add the ability to rename groups, and browse groups by popularity, activity, and topic, so that you can find a group you'd like to hang out in easier.

For us, groups are just another way for people to get together with their friends and talk about what they like. You can easily add all your friends to the group, make it private, or manage the members of your personal group (eg, remove people who you don't want to hang out, aren't in the same club, school, college, offic, etc). The groups feature is one we've had on our minds for a while, and it's exciting for us to see it live.

As always, please send us your feedback, as we love getting ideas, tipcs, and suggestions from you.

It's Yedda week here on the FunAdvice blog

Recently, I've been pondering public relations, press, and how the word of things spreads. Did you see my question about how to reach out to pete cashmore of mashable?. The reason being, we (FunAdvice) have yet to be written up in Mashable or TechCrunch, or any number of higher profile blogs that write about the kind of stuff we do at FunAdvice.

So given Yedda's luck in getting written up on both, I thought I'd do a quick comparison.

In Google, when you do an advanced search, you find Yedda has 9,800 questions. And similarly, you find they have 3,800 members. Their URLs are unique, and by removing the "duplicates" to just focus on user profiles and question URLs, it's pretty interesting.

Given their coverage by Mashable, TechCrunch, PC World, the MIT write up...honestly, I thought they'd have been bigger. Much bigger.

Now, let's take a look at how FunAdvice is doing, by those same metrics, according to Google (can you tell we love Google? lol).

58,000 questions indexed. Not bad. Nearly five times the number Yedda has. How about people? 11,800...in this case, we're about four times the size of Yedda.

What do third party reports say? See this quantcast chart comparing FunAdvice & Yedda. So, according to Quantcast, we're way ahead. Take a look at what compete.com says for FunAdvice vs Yedda. Again, we're light years ahead of them.

The only metric I can find that suggests we're losing, is Alexa.com. However, any webmaster will tell you, get five people (ironic, that's how many staffers Yedda has on their about page) and have them install the Alexa toolbar, and your metrics will take off.

Why am I writing all this? Mostly because I'm competitive - anybody who builds a product wants to win in their category. And because recently, Yedda got 2.5 million in funding. I've been happy to beat them without knowning how much money they had previously, however, knowing that we're beating them hands down when they have a ton more resources than us, somehow makes it that much more special.

Don't you think? :) Technorati tags:
yedda, funadvice, social networking, qna, questions, answers.

Have you ever wondered what drives social networks?

We ponder what drives social networks often here. One of the core themes we've discovered is music even though it's not an intuitive feature.

FunAdvice doesn't have much in the way of Music...however, the reason we added the Music category was that of all the interests entered by real users, Music was at the top of the list. I like Snoop Dogg myself, how about you?


Speaking of Snoop Dogg, we have some interesting search results for Snoop:
Search results for snoop dogg


However, when I looked at Yedda to compare & even entered "snoop dogg" as my interest for their semantic clustering technology...nobody's interested in snoop there. You can't even search for "snoop dogg" and Google search only finds 3 pages (2 of which the content on the Yedda page is from their Omgili integration).

Interesting stuff. So, being curious, I decided to see what's related to Eminem on Yedda (another favorite of mine):


What do you know - eminem is related to aids...very strange. If all we did (and we don't claim much in the way of semantic clustering techology, even though we do have an autocategorization tool that we've trained with machine learning on the various tokens in our site)...if all we did was extract the most common words next to "eminem" in the site, and match those to the category, we'd get:

eminem, music, lyric, lyrics...very related, and very good.

Where does this aids bit come from? Hardly intuitive. And strange, given their technology has "semantics" but the site doesn't have content even related to music.

Still, if you know something we don't about eminem & aids, please let me know.

Back to the point: music to a certain degree drives social networks - myspace, hi5, bebo, etc, all have huge music components. Last.fm, pandora, mog, are all based around music. Ilike.com is also based around music. People love music.

The British are coming!

Sometimes, I can't resist a cheesy joke. Did you know that as of yesterday, FunAdvice became the only truly multinational question & answer site?

Thanks to our ever talented developer, FunAdvice UK soft launched yesterday. We're incredibly excited, and plan on making the experience even more UK centric over time.

Growing strong for the last six months

In the spirit of being open, I thought I'd share a few stats with some folks.

1) unique visitors for the last six months


April so far puts us about 20% above March, which is fantastic, as our growth has accelerated somewhat.

2) pageview metrics for the past six months

We all know pageviews only tell part of the story - given our extensive use of ajax since we relaunched in September, if we had the "old" method of doing a few things, pageviews per user would be 40% higher. However, our current model, we believe, is much better for end users.

Obviously, I blurred out some of the specifics for competitive reasons. Given the growth rate above, is it any wonder why people say Alexa stats suck? Yep, their charts in no way reflect our growth rates. And, the actual numbers are higher than these (these were from Google Analytics) because a portion of the time, any web based beacon will not work, responsd, drop something, etc.

We're happy, but as we've not (yet) crossed the million page view per month number, we definitely have work to do. Based on my calculations, we'll get there at the current rate of growth by the end of May.

Got influence? Help us get a write up (shameless begging follows)

Ever since we crossed the two hundred thousand unique user number, we've been thrilled with the progress on the site. Everybody who we ask for feedback seems to stop with "great job" and doesn't have anything they'd improve.

So it stands to reason somebody out there would want to "cover the story" :)

About a month or two ago, gigaom interviewed me however, he's yet to write anything about us. I submitted to techcrunch but no luck there either, or with mashable which is a blog dedicated to social networking type sites (and has covered similar, smaller sites than ours). Even lifehacker ignores us when they've covered other, lessor known sites in the same space, with less unique features. Update - I'd like to add, we'd appreciate somebody here wired magazine's webservices category writing too.

I spammed a guy I consider the most lovable wanker online and he didn't seem intererested.

Do you know any of these people? Or richard macmanus at readwriteweb? These are just the first few I can think of, we've written dozens more, begging to get some "coverage" for our story.

Imagine: the fastest growing Q&A site (according to Quantcast.com), growing faster than Yahoo Answers, Askville, Live QnA, Answerbag, etc, with no venture capital, and very few people want our take on things, or care to share our story.

Well, I'd like to change that. If you have influence, some, a little, or even none, write them & ask them to cover us. Or, if you blog, write up anything you like about our site, and we'll make ourselves available for any & all questions you might have. In fact, if you take a look through the previous coverage about us, I've made myself available before, and am perfectly willing to do it again.

Thanks for listening, I'll stop begging now.

FunAdvice search results page upgraded

Over the weekend, our programmer (hi Eric) spent his holiday making a better search engine for the site. Now you can search posts, users, and images, all in one shot.

Take a look at this search, the user names, and the photos. Not bad, if we do say so ourselves (pat, pat, pat). Can you guess which other large question & answer site has such search results?


I'll give you a clue: none of them do. We're the first :) And, I must say, even with our small library of images, the results are pretty fun.

Let us know what you think, as always we love your feedback!

A brand new FunAdvice in the works

Few people know this, but in April, 2006, our designer came up with the look & feel you see on FunAdvice.com today.

However, because FunAdvice is a hobby for us (we all have day jobs) it took us until September to relaunch the site with the new design, new features & functionality.

Well, today, I was looking at a mock up of a new page design from December, and didn't realize until today that we've had that redesign for almost four months now. Since last time, it took five months to go from new design to relaunch, that means we must be about a month away from launching the design's we're working on.

It involves a lot of discussion & analysis of what people are doing on the site, what you like / dislike about what we're doing, and how we can make the site better for those that enjoy it the most. Redesign is a tricky process.

And, we have a list of things we'd like to enable you to do. Add comments to photos, rate photos, do more than just see yourself in your area:
members in cupertino of which, I'm the only one (lol) despite there being loads of people on the site from nearby areas such as San Jose, San Mateo, etc.

So for the "geo" page as we call it, we want to see who else is near, what they're interested in, what photos they might have added. We think it's a "good" idea. What about you?

Are there any "must have" features we're missing from the site? Would you like to preview the beta version in two weeks to see what it's like? Let us know by using our contact form if you're interested.