Compete web stats: we're still growing the fastest

Yes, this blog is more about self promotion than anything else. Sure, we have feature announcements and other posts about the industry at large but mostly we want to convey our sense of purpose, goals, and milestones along the way to becomming the best and largest question answer site around.

Compete just recently updated the stats on answerbag, funadvice and yedda . You can guess who's growing the fastest, right? It's a pity that so many people use & rely on Alexa because I can't fathom why it shows us as behind Yedda in particular especially because we monitor their metrics: in real life, we're four times larger than they are.

Ah, and one other thing: when you go to sign up on FunAdvice now, we've automated a few numbers, specifically, those with the number of members and number of answers we have on our site. Previously, I'd go and update those every few weeks, or month, or more depending on my schedule. The problem was that we recently hit 20K members, and I hadn't update the page for a while. And we're over 50K answers now, which isn't nearly as big as Yahoo Answers, but growing, fast.

Our service is about to take a quantum leap forward, as well. Last week, we finished up the visual design of our latest version, and to complete the vision, we're building a few new pieces of technology that will make it easier than ever to get good, fast, and relevant answers to your questions. It'll also make it easier and more fun to browse, read, and discover interesting people, photos, and content that's important to you and your specific interests.

As always, let us know if you have any feedback. Thanks!

Rating photos just got more fun

The last release of photo upgrades went well, and then we took it a small step further: ratings are at the top of the main photo page, and when you rate a photo, you get automatically pointed at the next photo on the site.

Now, I realize I'm not a great photographer, but I think this photo is awesome: jellyfish at monterey bay aquarium. Of course, their color, the water, and the lighting they use in that tank make it easy for just about anybody to take a great jellyfish picture.

How about you? I know you've taken some great photos, have you uploaded them to your gallery yet? As always, comments, questions, and suggestions on our upgrade very welcome.

New Photos features are live: just an FYI, we're not flickr ;)

This morning, we released a big upgrade to the section of site dedicated to photos: your photos, specifically. There are still some bugs, tweaks, and improvements to be made, but we're sure that you will be excited about the enhancements.

First, take a look at the new picture page:
Geotrax train set pic from Christmas time, even though I uploaded this it was my wife who took it. Notice the new features: thumbnails of other photos from your album, tags below the photo (add some if you like, especially if there aren't any!), and also the ability to rate & comment on the photo.

All in all a pretty big improvement, however, the UI still needs some work.

Now, take a look at the new thumbnail page:
thedude's photos...yes, it's me who writes the blog, in case you didn't know. The seperation of the larger browse from the main picture page is a big step forward as well, now you can see all the thumbnails (with pagination at the bottom if they have more) of a particular person's pictures, instead of loading a lot of very small thumbnails on a single page.

As I mentioned in the title of the post, we're not Flickr. Not even close :) However as you can see, we are serious about photos, just as we are about questions. The vision we have for the site is really a juxtaposition of a few larger services in a new, different, and fundamentally revolutionary way.

Stay tuned, you'll be glad you did. Tags: funadvice, flickr, yahooanswers, photos and tags.

Fifteen thousand unique visitors on a Sunday with 44K pageviews

Gosh, can you tell I love statistics? Especially when they're going up and to the right ;). While I haven't been one to brag, FunAdvice is clearly the FASTEST GROWING Q&A site on the internet.

Check out this chart: quantcast comparison of FunAdvice, Answerbag, Askville, and Live QnA. The chart shows clearly that FunAdvice is growing the fastest. Sure, we're not the biggest (yet) that'd be Yahoo Answers. However, our growth rate is much higher than any other site in our category.

This is the chart from QuantCast to compare FunAdvice to Yahoo Answers. The problem is the massive size of Yahoo Answers makes any chart by comparison look tiny. So, you have to calculate the growth rates: FunAdvice with 140% (per the chart, the real number is higher) vs Yahoo Answers growth rate of 60% or so. AND, Yahoo Answers is slowing, according to that chart.

We'd like to thank our visitors, our partners, our employees, advisors, and everybody who signed up to use our service.

As usual, if you have any questions, comments, etc, let us know! Tags: funadvice, askville, qna, live qna, yahoo answers, yahooanswers, web2.0, and wondir.

Have you read what would machiavelli do by stanley bing?

Last year, I picked up a book on a whim called What would machiavelli do? The ends justify the means. The author was Stanley Bing, who's apparently a comedian because the book was not only engaging, but funny as well.

The author used quotes from modern day titans like Trump, Madonna, Jack Welch, and others who have done amazing things in business in their respective fields, to illustrate the teachings of Machiavelli. The excuse was that the language has changed so much, it would be easier to pass along the parables with icons we can related to, like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and other industry heroes.

What's this got to do with FunAdvice? Great question!

The long and short of it is that while we could embrace more aggressive tactices (cough, cough, previous post, etc) we firmly believe that there are some things that are aggressive and OK, while others are simply unacceptable. Hopefully, you appreciate the difference, and vote with your feet when you chose a question and answer site to participate in, or community to be a part of.

Web-kinz hired a company to do social media spam tagetting US

I'm pissed. These fuckheads at Web*kinz decided to hire some forum spammers or similar low life scum to start dropping their brand name on our site.

Give me a fucking break people! You just got written up in Gigaom for having a large virtual world, and then you try to spam somebody who, until 10 minutes ago, had a bit of respect for you b/c of your rapid growth.

Go screw yourselves, seriously. Technorati tags: webkinz, ganz, kinzcash.

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.