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/