Sunday, 24 December 2006

Revenue Giveaway Change

It has been nearly a year since Simpy started giving away 100% of the revenue made from some of the ads shown on its pages. If you missed the announcement, you should read Announcement: Simpy is Profitable. While the numbers are not as high as those in Web 2.0 Disruption, a solid number of Simpy users entered their Google AdSense IDs. The reason I decided to share and give this away to people is because I wanted to recognize the value that they and their bookmarks bring to Simpy. However, what if people who once entered their AdSense IDs leave and stop using Simpy? I feel it makes sense for Simpy to continue sharing revenue with people, as long as they actively keep sharing their bookmarks. With that in mind, I did a bit of looking and found that at the moment a little less than a quarter of users who entered their AdSense IDs are still actively using Simpy. Starting from the next Simpy release, the revenue will be shared only with those people who are still actively using Simpy. I think that's fair. I've had this change in mind for a while now, but just got around to making the appropriate modifications and posting this announcement now. It's called tying the lose ends as this year comes to its end.
Posted by otis at 12:57 AM in News & Announcements
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Christmas Present: (No)follow Me

Who doesn't like spam, raise your hand! I love spammers. I'm sure you love them, too. Come on, admit it. They are such nice fun-loving people, making the Internet and the Web so much better with every new spam link, every new "article", every new .info or domain, every new erection-aiding medicine, acne treatment, and breast enhancement email they send us. This love is not unrequited, one-sided love, either. These people love us all, too. They love Simpy, as well, of course. They love to make it better while trying to use it for self-promotion and promotion of their ads-laden health-info, make-money-from-blogs, and other fun sites. They love to work it to help their PageRank.

It's a holiday season, everyone is in good spirits, and they say this is the season of giving, so I thought I'd give these friendly folks some more love in the form of rel="nofollow" attached to all of their (and everyone else's) links on Simpy. This means no more link love for spammers (but also for non-spammers) as soon as the next push hits the live servers. Happy holidays, spammers!

I wonder what Kevin Burton of TailRank thinks about this. He has has blogged about "nofollow" a number of times before.

Are you wondering what this rel="nofollow" is all about? Check this for some relevant pointers.

Posted by otis at 12:05 AM in News & Announcements
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Thursday, 21 December 2006

2006 Finale: Alexa Top 10K

Earlier this month, I realized Simpy was pretty close to being in Alexa's top 10,000 (see this), but then the unfortunate memory leak happened. You can see the December drop on that Alexa chart. Damn, some bad luck! It would have been nice to finish 2006 in top 10K. Next year... Hm, next year...what should be the goal for 2007? Any suggestions?
Posted by otis at 12:18 AM in /
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Wednesday, 20 December 2006

Memory Leak Plugged

Looking back at this month's posts, I see it's all been about Simpy maintenance and other uninteresting stuff. The only exception was the post about Google buying Simpy (not really). I also see that I proclaimed victory way too soon (two weeks ago!). If you saw Simpy's Gremlinization page, over the last few weeks, I apologize. During an upgrade that happened almost a month ago, a bug entered the system. I spent maaaaany late nights trying to find the source of the problem. I finally found it earlier this week. The bug was a memory leak that caused Simpy to run out of memory ever 6-12 hours, depending on the traffic. This leak turned out to be in an external library. Once found, it was quickly fixed and deployed.

I'll be brave and optimistic once again and proclaim another victory (over evil bugs!) and even tell you that I think you should be experiencing faster and certainly more stable Simpy. I felt really really bad about the recent instabilities, so I think I'll even send out an email to people who might have had difficulties with Simpy over the last few weeks.

Posted by otis at 11:55 PM in News & Announcements
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Saturday, 9 December 2006

Party at Midnight Tonight

Here at Simpy, we are having a party at midnight tonight (00:00 EST). We'll shut down servers for a little bit as well, so they too can take a break serving us all. Their partying will be brief, though. They will be back at work after only about half an hour of resting/partying. I hear Britney Spears may join us for the party, too.
Posted by otis at 7:08 PM in News & Announcements
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Saturday, 2 December 2006

Pandia Suggests Google Buys Simpy

I just came across a review of social bookmarking services, over at Pandia. Here is an interesting snippet from the end of the review:

But where’s Google? The Google Bookmarks tool is simply no good compared to these top 5 tools. The design is uncluttered and the service looks deceptively easy to use, but you need to spend a lot of time figuring out how things work. There is no Help link in sight and the help I found searching Google’s help base wasn’t always useful. Google should either start spending some serious money developing this tool or go out and buy one, like Simpy, which is a very decent service with good community features.

Heh, that's funny thought.... although not funny enough to make me forget the week from hell.
Posted by otis at 1:44 AM in /
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Up Down Up Down Up Down Up - I Won!

The last week was a week from hell for Simpy. After a successful backend surgery, which included a performance fix and an upgrade of one of the backend component, Simpy was quickly able to take on more traffic than before. Not long after I was done patting myself on the back, I realized that something was awry with the service, but it took me a whole week to get to the bottom of it and fix it. This is why, if you visited Simpy last week, you might have caught Simpy being turned into a Gremlin.

Why am I sharing this? Because I would like to apologize for the past week's instability, and to let you know that the service is stable again.

Posted by otis at 1:32 AM in News & Announcements
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