Comcast, traffic shaping, and FunAdvice: a scary 30 minutes

So if you haven't followed the on going net neutrality issue, you should. The US government has failed so far to pass legislation to make it illegal to discriminate via access to various websites.

In effect, it's not illegal, technically speaking, for Comcast to do as it's been reported which is fake traffic to various P2P networks to make them unreachable by customers. I'm fine with that, and in fact, I think it's a novel way to try to stem the tide of piracy. As an aspiring author (I dreamed about writing novels as a kid) I want if I chose to write a book, to be able to earn the expected reward.

However, earlier today, FunAdvice was unreachable by two Comcast customers. Both myself and my sister in law couldn't reach the site. However, our hosting provider (ServerBeach, in Texas) could, as well as Ericson, in Florida (co-founder and engineering guru), and even my in laws, in Geneva, Switzerland.

While on the phone with Comcast, they suggested I power cycle my modem. I refused, telling them that only made sense for general connectivity issues, NOT for being unable to reach a single website.

After about 25 minutes of arguing, FunAdvice came back. Now, they still haven't told me why, and insist that nothing was wrong. However, given their public history of traffic shaping, is it out of the question that they might be doing this to mid teir websites to save money on bandwidth?

They can't do it to Google, or Yahoo, because too many people would notice. And if they picked on very small websites with less than a few visitors per day, it wouldn't save them any money. But, if they selectively limited access to mid sized websites with audiences in the one million visitor range, they could effectively curtail some of their network traffic, and potentially not arouse much suspicion.

I'd rather be an optimist, and say this can't be true. However, with no logical explanation from Comcast, my curiosity is piqued.

If you run a website, please sk your customers if today between 2-2:30 PST, if they couldn't connect to your site if they use Comast Cable for their internet access.

Especially if they live in the bay area, in California. With enough data, we can get to the bottom of this, and make sure to hold Comcast responsible for it's actions, OR the unreliability of it's network.

On one hand, it could have been a "glitch"...but, if it was, there would be evidence, and Comcast has never been slow to admit network issues in the past. The only alternative is that they are indeed prioritizing traffic, which is evil, violates the 1st amendment, and must be stopped.

Ning is smaller than FunAdvice according to TechCrunch & Comscore

A picture is worth a thousand words. Ning, backed by famed entrepreneur, social networking platform 3.0, etc, etc...has less traffic than we did in October.

Per the chart, they look like they're about 10% behind us. What's $55,000,000 in funding get you? Not sure, exactly. They have a killer team and a killer product, imho...but, apparently, money isn't everything.

:) This made my day.

Friend feed launched, a million unique visitors, and more

So we crossed the million visitors mark more than a month ago, which means, the total number of people (including repeats) that visit the site. Which was cool.

However, as of this morning, we crossed the million unique visitor mark. Very, very cool. That means, one million unique people (unless they visit from home + work + cell phone, etc) visited FunAdvice over the last 30 days. Wow.

This week (Mon - Wednesday) we've averaged 40K unique visitors per day, which is very cool, as that continues our run rate of 15% or so monthly growth that we've had for more than 13 months.

Now, on to the new feature mentions:
1) Friend feed - this has all your friends activites, photos, profile comments, photo ratings, answers, questions and new friendships listed on your profile page. I'm excited about it, and I think it's one of our coolest new features in a long time.

2) Better friend management. When you add somebody as a friend, you go on their friend list, and they go on yours. You can set to "must approve" which enables you to decide who becomes your friend, and who doesn't.

There is list of 20+ enhancements to the features in the queue already, and even more growth and infrastructure related work to be done as the site continues it's rampant increase in members and activity.

Thanks everybody, I truly never imagined almost five years ago that FunAdvice would reach this place. And to be honest, I firmly believe our product will be ten times better in the year ahead, as we continue to improve the features, functionality, and overall experience.

Don't panic: update in progress

Sometimes, we can't time things perfectly. For example: our update that's in progress. I apologize for any frustration, annoyance, or disappointment for our site being down this morning, however, it's for a good cause.

The update in progress has a number of exciting, wonderful, and for us, ground breaking enhancements.

All this & we had more than 42K visitors yesterday ;)

So very very confused about a number of things

first, this traffic chart indicates almost zero traffic on yedda.com going anywhere other than their default subdomain.

Then, I read that yedda was acquired and that 90% of their traffic was through partners.

Now is Alexa that wrong? I've known they are off before...but, according to that TechCrunch post, Yedda or AOL is claiming Yedda received 8 million visitors in October between partner sites and their own site. That makes them the 3rd largest Q&A site overall.

However, I've been watching them for a while. I have a hard, incredibly difficult time believing that they had 8 million visitors between their site & partners. When I worked at Yahoo, I was involved in any number of things. Even for the world's largest internet portal, partner sites don't drive that kind of volume unless they're publicly traded, massive organizations.

Yedda's partners are neither. Well, the truth will come out eventually :) In the meantime, congrats. They couldn't sell to Yahoo a few years ago (how do I know that?) but they did find a buyer.

Quality versus quantity: Wiki Answers hits a million questions

Holy smokes batman, that's a lot of questions. Congrats, they've certainly increased the noise on the acquisition they made last year for a reported $2 million (I reviewed their SEC filings because at some point, we might be entertaining offers).

However, check this answer out bollocks as they say in the UK. Why is that?

The person who asked the question *never* got an answer. They answered their own with a follow up question, "I need an answer". Other answers in the same category boast similar quality.

One other thing about Wiki Answers, does this look like search engine spam to you? The small text, there at the bottom.

How do we do at FunAdvice? Sure, we miss it sometimes, and I'd like to do better. If you have any ideas on how we can improve, drop us a note and we'll look into implementing your suggestion.