Featured in the New York Times, print & online

So imagine my surprise this morning:
New York Times life style write up.

We get a mention, and they clearly read a bit (but not a lot) of what we have on offer. The write up is awesome, as it's great to get some press and ESPECIALLY when it's a publication so world famous as the New York Times. I've always had a lot of respect for them personally.

However...it also tells us what we need to work on. The example they cited is one of our "less than stellar moments" in terms of the quality of answers on FunAdvice. So, we need to step up our game.

I have some ideas on that, and we're always working to improve. Stay tuned over the next few months, and I'm sure you'll be blown away.

Edit your profile, FunAdvice launches drag & drop editor

So we launched another press release today (it's been a year since our last one). And, even more exciting, we launched our new profile editor.

You can read the press release here:
yahoo news
or here:
market watch

We updated a few other things to:
Added group category pages
Made groups searchable
See in each category, what groups your friends are into
Performance fixes (I know, boring, but it's critical)
and a bunch of other good things.

The customized profile & the group discovery features are the two biggest, most visible changes though. As usual, please let us know what you think as we continue to improve our service.

Featured on retaggr

There are a few "profile aggregation tools out there, and one of them was kind enough to add our favicon to their list. Retaggr if profile aggregation OR you want an easy way to share all your profiles, this might be up your alley.

Thanks for featuring us, Nick, it's appreciated.

If you have a service that dovetails with ours...we'd love to hear from you.

Five and a half years, 100,000 members - our thanks

I forgot to double check yesterday, or the day before - and now we're already past it. The milestone. 100,000 members have signed up to participate on the site. More than 33% of those are still active (have logged in to the site in the last 90 days), which is just...well, amazing.

Getting people to sign up isn't everything, but it's a humbling experience to have so many people trust us, enjoy our service, and recommend it to their friends.

You have our thanks. We'll keep improving the site, based on your feedback and as usual, if you see something we can improve, please let us know. More than half the improvements we make are a direct result of requests, and we're going to keep building the site to meet your needs.

Quantcast top 1000 sites in the USA - we made it!

Quantcast is one of those services we monitor regularly, to see how we stack up against the rest of the sites out there.

While we're not "quantified", quantcast has been accurately tracking (to an unnerving degree) our US audience for many months now...we use Google Analytics internally, and the numbers are within 5%, which is amazing to me.

After a while, we've finally managed to crack the top 1,000 sites in the US on their list, for the first time ever! I know, I know - we're not facebook ($400 million in funding anybody?) or myspace ($900 million in revenue anyone?) but, with a 3 person team, and 6 part time people, it's gratifying to see that we can indeed accomplish something meaningful.

Of course, our ambitious, big & lofty goal is to change the world. I love Google, personally, and their "do no evil" business philosophy is inspiring...however, at FunAdvice, our goal is one step further: to proactively make the world a better place. With the founding team coming from three unique countries and cultures, and all of our children having dual citizenship (or more), it's imperative to us that people learn to get along, respect our similarities and what makes us individuals, as people or as cultures.

Personally, I (Jeremy, aka, thedude) come from a small town in Oregon. Bigotry & racism were rampant, and you could literally count the number of non European American people I grew up with on both hands. My wife is from a country that, until I met her, I'd never heard of. To me, this kind of 180 degree change in thinking *shouldn't* be possible, eg, all of our children should grow up more enlightened, more tolerant and more understanding.

With any luck and our future growth, we'll get the message of acceptance, tolerance and understanding communicated to the broader global community and make a huge impact in people's ability to embrace their fellow human beings.

Two million visitors in July, 2008: man, we're on FIRE

Just wanted to post a quick, this is AWESOME post here...we had 2 million visitors in July, 2008. How does that stack up to last year? Well...last July, we had less than 700K visitors. So we're almost, but not quite, 3x bigger this year than last year.

Thanks everybody for believing in us, using our service, and being patient with the occasional bugs. We've got big plans for the next twelve months and in June, we expanded our engineering team from 1.5 to 2.5, so you can imagine how much more we'll be able to get done, expand and improve the service.

Also so far, we've had two non profits help us help them through our unique partnership program. We have one more already in progress, so there are a total of seven spots that are not spoken for today.

If you have a cause that's important to you, let us help them by having them contact our company to see how much we can help. Thanks.