Simpy Chichimichi

I am happy to say that, judging from the adoption rates, the reaction to Simpy's ad money give-away has been overwhelmingly positive.

The way I see this, it is one of the first 2006 Web2.0 Disruptions [1]. Why do I think this is a disruption? This is why:

Suddenly, with Simpy giving away advertising money, where 100% of the earned profit goes to people whose Simpy pages the ads are on, one can make some money just by being a good "bookmarker" and "tagger", by doing a good job of aggregating, marking up and organizing data of interest to others. While no single individual will get rich doing just this, think of it in aggregate terms!

All of a sudden, each and every one of the 300,000+ del.icio.us users [2] (or anyone else out there) can start making a bit of extra money, without even having to own a web site, a home page, or a blog, and without doing any extra work. Instead of thinking of their bookmarks as a $100 value that del.icio.us and its VCs made from them, these same people can now actually make some money from the work they've put into searching, finding, saving, and tagging links!

Think for a second about those 300,000 people. Imagine that each of them makes use of Simpy's give-away. Imagine just a single month passing. Even if each of them earns only $3/month, together they would generate nearly $1,000,000/month!

Although Simpy would not see any of that money, I am excited that I can provide a framework, a mechanism that makes this possible. As I always say, I try to mimic nature/life with Simpy. By providing this service, I am trying to provide an open market that individual Simpy users can make use of.

[1] Incidentally, John Battelle thinks this is a year of Disruption for the Web, and is looking for a suitable Web 2.0 Conference tagline.

[2] Note that this is not a move to get del.icio.us users! I am simply using that service as an example, because its numbers are more or less known, and because they have it extra easy: they already have a large collection of tagged links that may be interesting to others, and they can move it to Simpy with 1 click, but without having to move to Simpy and abandon del.icio.us.

Simpy is profitable! Profitable? Yes, profitable for its members! I want to give something back. I've been running Simpy for several years now, and I've decided to give something back to people who make Simpy what it is. Call it a late New Year's present.

Starting today, every Simpy member has the ability to carry advertising on their Simpy pages, and take 100% of whatever he/she earns!

How it works:

Simpy has support for Google AdSense as a third party. Each Simpy member has his/her main page on Simpy (e.g. http://www.simpy.com/user/otis ). Every Simpy member can now enter his/her Google AdSense Id into Simpy, and his/her page will immediately start showing ads with his/her Id. All earnings from such ads go to members, as their Ids are used to display ads. The same may soon start happening on the search results page, and on the user profile page, once that is ready. Your page, your data, your ads, your money.

Not everyone (anyone?) is a big fan of advertising, and I don't really want to further clutter the UI, especially when there is so much available and interesting data to show. Luckily, I think I have a solution that will make most people happy, and that solution is as follows:

• Logged in Simpy members do not see any ads (not theirs, not other users').
• Only visitors or logged out users see ads. As soon as they log in, the ads are gone.

My hope is that by using this approach I will not annoy Simpy's members, and at the same time allow them to earn free money.

This is all it takes:

1. Log in to Simpy
2. Enter your AdSense Id (on the third party page)
3. Log out and check out your Simpy page

The AdSense with your Id should be shown. Whenever a person sees an ad or clicks on it, the money goes to your AdSense account (because your Id is associated with that ad). Money is made through both impressions and clicks.

Here are some "Potentially Frequently Asked Questions":

After two days of BarCamping, I'm BarCampedOut. You can see the list of various presentations from the event. Simpy presentation was today (Sunday) at noon.... in the kitchen, of course! I'll present Simpy in anyone kitchen any time. Kitchens are good.... and I'm not trying to be funny here. Here are some (LOTS!) of photos from the event. Miss Rogue is a photo-taking-uploading-and-tagging-machine. While she is "only" near-real-time now, she is soon going to be a real-time-photo-taking-uploading-and-tagging-bot. Little R2D2. Just wait 'till she gets her Wi-Fi camera going.

At BarCampNYC I had the pleasure of meeting David Czarnecki and watching his presentation on Internationalization, Localization, Globalization, etc. David is the man who wrote the Simpy Java API, and is the author of Blojsom, the blogging platform that powers Simpy Chichimichi.

I also spent some good time chatting with Byron Miller of Mozdex, Danny Wen of SuprGlu, and Scott Matthews, the author of Bitty Browser.

Finally, I had the opportunity to chat with Chris Messina from Flock. Hmmmm, Simpy in Flock? That would be nice, wouldn't it? Well.............

After a very successful BarCamp in San Francisco several months ago, BarCamp is coming to New York City - BarCampNYC!

While I'm currently not considering demoing Simpy at BarCampNYC, I think I will be attending the event. If any Simpy users are going to be there, email me or leave a comment if you are interesting in meeting.

Benjamin, a friend of Simpy's, wrote a cool bookmarklet that lets you save and tag links without ever leaving the page you are visiting. Of course, you need to be logged into Simpy, but that's very easy with Simpy's "remember me" feature. Very nice work, thank you Benjamin!

Last time I had to answer only 5 interview questions, but the number doubled since then. New Year's present? If you are interested in Simpy's history or its future, check out 10 questions with Otis Gospodnetić, an interview conducted by David Newberger. Some of you may recognize yourselves in some of the answers. If you like reading interviews, you can read David's past interviews here.

By now most people are back from their holidays and vacations. I wanted to wish everyone a happy 2006,and thank you for being the valuable members of the Simpy community.