Simpy Chichimichi

You can get Shareaholic from shareaholic.com or from the official Firefox add-ons site's shareaholic page.

1. I am really dropping adsense. Those who like Simpy for what it offers won't be bothered by this.
2. I am now also considering blocking bookmarks that enter Simpy via spam-infested services, such as OnlyWire, SocialPoster, social-bookmark-script.de and anyone else I come across. Are you using any of these services with Simpy? Let me know if you are.

There have been some improvements around search within a Group, too, so if you belong to any Groups, you will see search refining via Related Tags works now. Also, Group members now have their little icons shown next to their names, and clicking on those takes you to those people's profiles. Here is an example (look at the right side of the page).

How do you like having little icons next to people's names? Should Simpy have more of that in other areas of the site?

In a galaxy far far away, Simpy announced profit sharing with those people who enter their AdSense IDs in Simpy. Two years have passed and a number of people provided their IDs. However, recently I've noticed a trend of clueless or supposedly clueless people who choose to join Simpy purely (more or less) for this AdSense benefit. Long story short: I'm considering stopping this AdSense profit sharing business. Unless, by the following Friday somebody talks me out of stopping it, I'll axe it.

I've been running Simpy for almost 4 years now. Every once in a while I get the "Why should I use Simpy?", "Why is Simpy better than, say, del.icio.us?" This post answers those questions in the form of "Why I use Simpy" answer. This are my personal reasons for using Simpy, but you can also read other people's opinions. I also encourage you to add your reasons in the comments, so I can add your reasons to this list.

So, why I use Simpy:

1. Search! Powerful search! Fast search! Accurate search! Search that lets me easily refine the query via additional tags, or even expand it or alter it with a single click on a related tag. Why do I care about search so much? Because that is how I use Simpy - that is how I prefer to get to my previous saved bookmarks - I enter a few keywords (you can call them tags, sure) and a second later I have my bookmark(s).

   A lot more could be said about Simpy's search, but you can read about that in the search section in the FAQ.

   So is Simpy's search better than del.icio.us? Yes. It supports more operators, more powerful queries, and it's faster. Try, compare, and tell me what you find.

2. Speed. Simpy is fast! Search is fast, bookmarking is fast, browsing through your own or anyone else's tags is fast, and so on. Don't believe me? Look through these:
   • Ahead of Google, del.icio.us, etc.
   • Technorati - Google - Simpy
   • How I Learned to Love Tuning
   • How I Learned to Love Cache

   So is Simpy faster then del.icio.us? Oh yes! Just check GrabPERF any day of the week and you'll find Simpy way ahead of del.icio.us and the other bookmarking services that are being monitored there.

3. Tag completion and tag management. I hate seeing noise in my tags. I hate seeing multiple slightly different tags that are really the same thing. For example, I don't like seeing both "share" and "sharing" in my tags, and tag-completion exposes this very quickly. Whenever I see such near-duplication of tags, I click on the "tags/manage" link at the top of each Simpy page and quickly rename "sharing" to "share". Tag management also lets you delete tags, merge them, and split them.

   So does this make Simpy better than del.icio.us? Partly, I think. Del.icio.us has a nice tagging interface, similar to Simpy's tag-completion, but its tag management functionality is.... non-existent.

4. Groups. Simpy is a social bookmarking service, and Groups (FAQ entry) are not only how we share bookmarks, but really also how we people live. We have cliques, we have groups of friends, we have friends, we have family, we have colleagues. We share different things with each group. Groups let you share bookmarks with all Group members, even if you keep your bookmark private and thus hide it from the crowd. Here are my groups.

   There is also a handly Group Directory which lets you quickly find interesting Groups to join.

   How does Simpy compare to del.ico.us in this area? Well, del.icio.us doesn't even have Groups.

5. Good browser integration. Besides offering bookmarklets, Simpy offers 2-3 Firefox plugins:

   Andu's Firefox Plugin is simple, elegant, and does not use any of the valuable screen space - it sits in your existing Firefox toolbar!

   Smarky is another Firefox plugin and it is super powerful - it keeps your Firefox bookmarks synchronized with your Simpy bookmarks, has built in search (or can use Simpy's search), it uses your tags to create in-browser folders, much like with the original Firefox bookmarks.

   There is also a simple Firefox search plugin that goes in the top-right search field in your Firefox browser and allows searching directly from your browser.

   I'm a happy user of all 3 Firefox plugins and I use them daily.

   Del.icio.us comparison? Del.icio.us is just as good, I think, as it has good browser integration. No, del.icio.us is actually better, as it also has Internet Explorer integration via a toolbar.

   NOTE NOTE NOTE: Can you program? Windows? I would loooooooooooooove to get some help with Simpy integration into Internet Explorer or Windows in general. Please let me know if you can help.

6. Privacy. I like to share, as you can see on my profile. But some things I like to keep private. Again, this is how we live, too, so Simpy allows that natural behaviour.

   Del.icio.us? Has privacy option now (it didn't have it for the first few years of its life).

7. Natural tags. Do you like seeing TagsWrittenLikeThis? Or maybe tags_such_as_this? I do not. I prefer seeing "tags written like this" and "tags such as this". Isn't that more natural? This looks like a detail, but when you start tagging, using a system that comes naturally helps, trust me.

   del.icio.us is horrible in this respect, forcing people to WriteTagsLikeThis or like_this and separate them with spaces instead of commas (Simpy uses commas).

8. Notes. Although I don't use them daily, I do use Simpy for saving Notes. Notes are private, taggable, and fully searchable. I use them to save all kinds of little nuggets of information, from recipes to geek tips and tricks.

   You can't save Notes via del.icio.us, del.icio.us is only for bookmarks.

9. Transparency. Just like you can see posts about Simpy's improvements, you can also see posts with its Dirty Laundry. This doesn't benefit me directly, but being open makes me happy, and I hope others find this valuable.

   Is del.icio.us transparent? I don't know. Is it?

10. Damn, I need one more reason to make this a proper "10 Reasons...." post. What could I add? What did I miss? Got a suggestion?

Ouch... What's the story there, what happened?

Update: Rojo is back.....but it was down for a while. Winter hibernation?

So Jason Calacanis's Mahalo is growing, Hitwise reports. Surprise, surprise. Why is it growing when it appears so...not special/good?

Mahalo is simply SEO done right (no surprise, considering the founder's past experience).

Example: http://www.mahalo.com/Maria_Lauterbach_Missing
Count the instances of the exact "Maria Lauterbach Missing" phrase.
Now look for that on Google (not even as an exact phrase): http://www.google.com/search?q=Maria%20Lauterbach%20Missing

Mahalo is #4! That's high! That's clicks! That's traffic! That's ad impressions for Mahalo! That's ad clicks for Mahalo! That's $$$ for Jason! That's a future sale for Jason!

And this is the first Mahalo page I picked. I bet the same happens with a bunch of other pages. Very juicy and phrases repeated multiple times and matching commonly typed queries, often exactly. That's just one of the recipe ingredients. It's completely legit and nto rocket science.

This is where using Compete's Search Analytics would be a lot of fun -- anyone with credits to spare wants to tell us what searches lead people to Mahalo?

My bet? Entertainment queries, celebrity queries, entertainment news and all that type of stuff.

"...The main Search Wikia site is hosted in a secure underground hosting facility in a bunker in Iowa (http://usshc.com/) and calls to these indexes. So when showing cached pages and explain plans those requests go to their respective indexes..."

I'm a member of Apache Software Foundation and was excited to see Brian McCallister's Shindig proposal several weeks ago (I also voted for it getting into ASF). What's Shindig? It's to be the first public OpenSocial reference implementation. Here is Brian's video about all this.

Question: Should Simpy become an OpenSocial Container? Put another way, should Simpy add some of the functionality typically found on Social Networks (e.g. Facebook, MySpace...), such as adding friends, adding applications, viewing friends' activity, etc. and then allow others to build social applications that can be hosted by Simpy and used by Simpy members?

But let me ask you - what would you like to get from Simpy in 2008? What would make Simpy more useful to you? Here are some ideas. Post your wishes in comments!

• Better UI (e.g. less busy, cleaner look, more intuitive, etc.)
• More Social Network-like features (e.g. make it possible to add people to your network, to mark them as friends or contacts, to contact/message them directly from Simpy, etc.)
• Sorting by alphabet, click count, etc. (tell me which one is most important to you)
• More features in Groups (e.g. Group Notes, Group Messaging, something else?)
• More aggressive spam detection and removal
• More advanced Notes (e.g. Make them public, make it easy to post a Note to your blog, etc.)
• Better blog integration (e.g. automatically post your bookmarks to you blog every day, post Notes to your blog, etc.)
• Recommendations (i.e. recommend pages that you may like based on various things that Simpy knows about you)
• More information pushing via email (e.g. email recommended links on a nightly basis, email links from your Watchlist (Filters) on a nightly basis, email newly saved bookmarks in your Groups, etc.)
• Anything else?