Somebody accuses US of dissing a competitor? Nope.

Look, for the record, if we're going to go take a dump on another competitor, I'm perfectly happy of being up front about it. This bit is NOT us, and I have no idea who the guy is that posted the stuff.

What IS funny is that several times the answers.com folks have spammed our blog (aka, astroturfing) and they tend to have the same person do so when it seems to be "company sanctioned activity". :) We do similar, when our teams goes out and does outreach etc.

Speaking of competitors: when does a company simply cash it in? One company that's burning money & competes with us has raised 16 million, a few others have raised less, but still millions...if I was the investor of any of these companies, I'd be looking to take heads.

Fact: if you're burning capital and generating tens of millions of visitors per month, something is wrong with your business model.

Is this what failure looks like?

Wow...I had no idea. Did you imagine failure looking like this, too?

Amazon Cloudfront, Funadvice and Google

So, last Saturday, i got a worried call from my intrepid partner Jeremy. We recently switched to Amazon S3, for hosting of images, and things were super-slower than usual when it comes to rendering the web page.

I'd read about Amazon Cloudfront recently and we decided to give it a shot, especially since it was easy to setup, cheap, hopefully effective. We already had our content in an Amazon S3 bucket, so it was a no-brainer.

You can actually setup the whole thing using the super-cool S3Fox Firefox Plugin in under 15 minutes. Just make a new cloudfront distribution, point it to your S3 Bucket, and optionally create a CNAME to point your content to the right place.

We opted to keep our images.funadvice.com domain, made it into a CNAME that pointed that  to the our cloudfront provided domain. Now we have a few million items in our S3 Bucket. Its impressive that in a few minutes, i could turn the whole thing over to cloudfront with nary a hiccup. The pages render very noticeably snappier now, and it shows in the web metrics, user uptake, etc.

Why bring up google in all of this?

Well, yesterday there was an uproar about Google forgetting about their commitment to net neutrality by simply talking to ISP's about setting up what is a CDN on their premises thats closer to users.

The culprit in all of this rumors? The Wall Street Journal. But it was all over the non-tech informed blogosphere pretty soon. By this morning, things were returning somewhat back to normal, but its interesting to see that something so basic about the internet is still misunderstood by some pretty savvy people.

Sites have been using CDN's (Content Distribution Networks) for years now. Akamai and CacheFly are but two of the many CDN companies out there. They all provide the same service that Funadvice is taking advantage of right now. Its the same service that Google is setting up so we all can get a better experience when we watch that next Youtube video.

But to return to our implementation though, it reminded me of when Google started their Adwords program. If I remember correctly, a major part of their success was that you could get your ads online in under 15 minutes. If you were advertising with Yahoo's Overture, forget about getting your ads up in less than 48 or hour hours. Two days!! Versus 15 minutes.

In 15 minutes we were able to get Cloudfront up, without talking to a sales rep from another company. On a weekend. Thats impressive. 

No doubt the offerings from other CDN companies are probably more robust with more POP's and so on. But for not this is good enough for us. And importantly, cheaper.

FunAdvice down: don't panic, we're experiencing some turbulence

The last few years, my wife & I have traveled a lot. Ericson also travels a fair bit. So, the three of us have a lot of experience being on planes when you know, some turbulence hits.

It does suck, and can potentially ruin your appetite, book, or nap...but, sooner than you know it, the turbulence goes away and things are all right again.

In the immortal words of captain's everywhere: we're experiencing a bit of turbulence, nothing to be worried about, the flight will resume it's smooth sailing shortly :)

Thanks for your patience.

New record in November: is that crickets i hear chirping?

So, in November, FunAdvice had just over 7K more visitors than October. Which, considering it's a day shorter & the whole turkey-day thing (did you eat too much, too?)...well, I'd say that was awesome.

Other highlights:
1) Highest day of traffic, ever (85.9K...almost 86K visitors).
2) Highest amount of active members, ever (that's very key...)
3) I think I'm more "in love" with our future plans than ever...

since I do a poor job of keeping things secret, and, FunAdvice is already the most personalized q&a site in the world (with our profile editor...) we're going to continue along that direction.

See, a while back, I read the book "positioning", and, well, I like the concept. A lot. So, given that we're already the world's leading personalizable q&a site, we're going to keep going that way, so that we can dominate that space.

Umm...if you compete with us, just ignore what I'm saying ;) Seriously. Nothing to see here...