Simpy Chichimichi

Thanks to the valuable contributors, Simpy now supports 9 languages:

1. English
2. Chinese (Simplified)
3. French
4. German
5. Italian
6. Korean
7. Portuguese
8. Russian
9. Spanish

I see this as a great achievement, and I am very proud of the people who contributed their knowledge, will, and time to help out Simpy, an more importantly, make it easier for those who do not speak English to use Simpy. Thank you, contributors!

Here is where we are with respect to the world language coverage:

As you can see, a lot has been covered, but it looks like we are only about half way to the full coverage of the world's languages - Northern and Eastern Europe are not covered, Middle East and some of the the ex-Soviet republics are not covered, Africa is virtually blank, and South East Asia is yet to be done. Lots of work ahead! Can you help? Can you translate from English to any of the unsupported languages? Is your language covered? If you'd like to join the list of Simpy's valued contributors, please let me know.

What comes after the Portuguese announcement? The Spanish one, of course! That's right, Simpy in Spanish is here! Simpy's Spanish translation was gratiously contributed by Tita Beaven (profile)

Here are some interesting and educational tidbits about Spanish (and English and Mandarin):

Between 1980-2040 the world's Spanish-speaking population will increase 103%, UNO estimations indicate. 538 million people will have Spanish as their first language! 23.45 million Europeans, Spaniards excluded, declared to be able to speak Spanish, as Instituto Cervantes published recently.

English is still the most popular language among those studying a foreign language, and Mandarin Chinese has the leading spot as the most spoken language in the world with over 1 billion native speakers! Spanish, the second fastest growing language in the world, had 402 million native speakers in 2005.

As is the case with all languages supported by Simpy, if your browser is configured to show any of those languages, you will automatically start seeing the interface with text in that language, just like Spanish is shown in the above image. To configure your browser for a particular language, just read this Browser Language Setting How-to with screenshots to guide you.

Last week was full of announcements - three new languages are supported: Simplified Chinese, Korean, and Russian, plus Simpy got a major boost (more about that in a subsequent post) from the newly installed hardware. The three languages cover most of Asia, so it's time to move on to a new continent. Which one is it gong to be? Let's go to, mainly, South America!

I am very happy to announce that Simpy is now available in Portuguese! There you go Portugal, there you go Brasil! And here is the obligatory screenshot.

From what I can tell, there are very few Brasilians and Portuguese hanging out on and making use of Simpy. If the cause was the language barrier, that barrier should be gone now. Come on Brasil, get off of Orkut and start bookmarking! Simpy wants you!

Of course, this translation is the work of another passionate Simpy fan, Tupi Databa. Thank you, Tupi! Thanks to Tupi, Simpy now covers about half of South America, at least geographically. Where are we going next?

Simpy will be down for a scheduled maintenance, starting around 01:00 EST. The downtime should be around 30 minutes. Once the service is back up, it will run in a read-only mode for a while (could be a few hours). Read-only mode means you will be able to use Simpy for browsing, searching, etc., but will not be able to save new bookmarks, create Groups, Watchlists, etc. Finally, when everything is ready, we'll go back to normal service.

Once the service is back up, I hope you'll feel the difference!

Update: we're back! The real down-time was only about 30 minutes and for once almost everything went smoothly. Knock on wood. I can see the definite improvement in performance, and I hope you can, too.

Do you speak and read Russian? If you do not, you'll probably want to skip this post. On the other hand, if you do read Russian and prefer seeing Russian versions of sites you visit than the now pretty much standard English versions, you will be happy to hear that my old college friend Marina Pustilnik recently translated Simpy to Russian. Spasibo, Marina!

To see Simpy in Russian, just tell your browser you prefer Russian to English or any other language. Don't know how to talk to your web browser? Then read this Browser Language Setting How-to with screenshots to guide you.

Last Friday I announced Simpy's support for Simplified Chinese. This week I'm continuing with Asian announcements: Simpy now supports Korean! The translation was done by Jongyun, Kim - thank you Jongyun! With his translation, Jongyun broke a Simpy translation speed record. If I remember correctly, Jongyun translated everything in less than 48 hours!

If you want to see Simpy in Chinese, or any other supported language, I think you will find this Browser Language Setting How-to with screenshots useful.

Now here is one thing I don't have a good explanation for. While South Korea is one of the most wired countries, and its citizens are quite at home with the Web, there are relatively few of them using Simpy or any other social bookmarking service. At the same time, a lot of their neighbours do use Simpy - I see Chinese, Japanese, Taiwanese, people from Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysians, etc., but very few Koreans. Why don't I see more Koreans using social bookmarks? Are there Korea-specific social bookmarking services I don't know about? Do you have a hypothesis? I'd love to see what others think about this - the comments are open!

Where I come from, people tend to live from summer to summer. Winter is spent mostly hibernating, in cafes, at home, in clubs, bars, etc. Where I live, life goes on 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. There is no stopping. People work a lot, but lots of those people also party a lot. People there typically have very full schedules - work, bar, opera, cinema, dinner in a restaurant, etc. Where I am now, people seem to live from New Year to New Year. Well, perhaps that is an exaggeration, or rather, I don't know enough about this place to really say that with confidence. However, I do know that people take a month off during the New Year, businesses pretty much shut down, some workers get paid a double monthly salary, etc.

Now that I made these nice generalizations, how about a quiz? What are the three places I'm referring to? If you don't know the answer, the answer is on the back of the page, look behind your monitor.

Or, perhaps, this will reveal one of the places I am describing:

The Chinese New Year, the year of the pig, starts in only a few moments. Simpy wishes a Happy New Year to China, and especially to all those Chinese who will, I hope, find Simpy easier to use now that it is available in their language. As I pointed in September 2005, Chinese is one of the top languages used by Simpy visitors, so I am very happy to be able to provide the Chinese flavour of Simpy to those people. If you want to see Simpy in Chinese, or any other supported language, I think you will find this Browser Language Setting How-to with screenshots useful.

My big thanks to Andrew Sun, who not only did all the translation, but also helped troubleshoot character encoding issues (geek-speak) that arouse during integration of his translation. Unfortunately, there is one more thing to figure out - the Simplified Chinese version of Simpy renders correctly when viewed with Firefox or Opera (and I presume Safari and Konqueror), but it does not render correctly when viewed by Internet Explorer. Hm, hm, hm. Got any ideas? Please email them.

This is a translation of Simpy to Simplified Chinese, thus being the most useful to people in mainland China (People's Republic of China). I would also love to provide a translation for Traditional Chinese, so if you can read English and can write Traditional Chinese, please email me. As always, contributors names and link go to the contributors page.

Finally, here are the answers: Croatia, New York, China.

While everyone from TechCrunch to Valleywag is busy writing about Powerset and giving the same two "books for children" vs. "books by children" examples, nobody is talking about some of the technology behind Powerset. Everyone is focused on whether they'll be able to beat Google, on over-hyping them, on making fun of the guy from their party video (the guy really messed up, really didn't sound smart, really didn't give us a lot of confidence that Powerset will come out with something revolutionary), on whether/who will acquire them, etc.

Powerset is making a lot of use of Apache Software Foundation tools. More precisely, they are making use of Hadoop, an open-source implementation of Google's MapReduce that includes a distributed file system called HDFS, which is an open-source implementation of GFS (Google File System), and a lot more, and are working on HBase, an implementation of Google's BigTable (SmallChair, anyone?). I'm sure they are using a few other things, too. They are very likely using Nutch as well, but I haven't seen evidence of that yet. As a member of the Lucene development team, I am very happy to see them put all this stuff to good use!

Oh, and Powerset is apparently using a 400 node cluster from Amazon's EC2, as you can see here.

Those who have tried using Simpy with Opera know that when they try accessing any portion of Simpy that required the person to be logged in, they would get kicked back to the login page. This wasn't always so, but it has been broken for quite a while.

A new Simpy member from Norway emailed me last week and reported that he got Simpy to work with Opera. He did that by using a certain proxy server (privoxy) and configuring it to remove certain HTTP header (Cookie2, if you're curious) that only Opera web browser sent back to Simpy. This Cookie2 header was causing problems with one of the third party components Simpy is using (mod_jk, you curious reader!). Once he pointed his finger at Cookie2, I was able to get the latest and fixed version of the problematic third party component and quickly verify that the problem with Opera was indeed fixed - welcome Opera users!

Needless to say, this made my day! Thank you, Frode! To all Opera users out there who tried using Simpy, but gave up - I am sorry about the problems, and sorry it took this long to fix this problem. I hope you will give Simpy another try. I will be emailing those Opera users who have emailed me about this problem in the past.

There are always a lot of news stories and blogs posts comparing Alexa to the recently launched competitors Compete and Quantcast. The debates are always focused on accuracy, and there is never a clear winner, because nobody can say with certainty which service is closest to the real numbers.

But, their accuracy aside, there is one thing neither Compete nor Quantcast have, and Alexa does - timeliness! Alexa updates more or less daily, while the other two are over a month behind. I can look at Alexa and get a rough idea about the traffic (spike, drop, etc.) of a site from last week or less. With Compete and Quantcast one has to wait over a month. It is almost mid-February in 2007 and Quantcast and Compete still show only December 2006 data! How non-addictive!

See also: Alexa Gets Competition

As I outlined in the introduction for this series of posts, the first item to address is the ability to use tags to mimic the traditional folder tree structure.

To help with the explanation, I used Simpy's demo account and created a bookmark with categories that, if you look at them closely, look much like the traditional folder structure. Here they are:

• web_service_bookmarks_social
• web_service_free
• tags
• search engine

Clearly, the first two tags are one way of imitating the traditional folder structure. Thus, by going go http://www.simpy.com/user/demo/tag/web_service_bookmarks_social you end up in the "web_service_bookmarks_social" "folder", and by going to http://www.simpy.com/user/demo/tag/web_service_free.

And there you have it, that's one way of using tags as folders. But there is more. When tags are combined with search, as they are in Simpy, you can also see everything under a given "folder", including its "sub-folders" by going to http://www.simpy.com/user/demo/search/web_service_bookmarks*, plus, you can also have more wildcard fun with http://www.simpy.com/user/demo/search/web*bookmarks*.

In the examples above, I chose to use "_", because "/" has a special meaning in a URL, and using those would just "dirty" the URLs, which we try to keep clean in this "Web 2.0 World". The "-" has a special meaning for search (exclude bookmarks with this term/tag/keyword/title/...), and "|" also has a special meaning in search syntax - it is a synonym for the OR operator (c.f. Simpy's search syntax)

I do not use tags this way, but as the examples show, this is certainly possible. The reason I don't use tags in this fashion is that I find that using them this way would be too restricting for my taste. While I generally like things to be well organized (no major mess on my desk, no messy code, no messy apartment...), I find this use of tags to be too restricting, too time-consuming, and not very good when the time to find just that one link I want in my massive bookmark collection. How do you use your tags? To categorize? As keywords? Both? As Folders? Something else?

In the next post of this series we'll cover how to maintain order while using tags (think: HTML vs. html, SanFrancisco vs. sanfrancisco, monkey vs. monkeys, etc.)

Recently, I had the opportunity to exchange some thoughts with unhappy users of another social bookmarking service (another one of those that are no longer maintained, but I'll write more about that in a separate post). The person liked the benefits of using folders for his bookmarks and had his doubts about tags. I've seen this so many times by now, that I took the opportunity to create some examples and address the issue.

This person had 3 main concerns:

1. Can tags be used like folders?
2. Don't tags lead to inconsistencies (e.g. using both upper-case and lower-case variations of essentially the same tag, or using both plural and singular for the fundamentally the same tag.)
3. Don't tags require you to enter those tags and run a search before you can get to all the items tagged with it?

I took this opportunity to explain the benefits and the power of tags. I used Simpy for my examples, but most of what I said should be applicable to any other service or product or tool worth its salt that uses tags and combines them with search, as Simpy does. In the end, the person compared my explanation to a sales pitch, which I actually take as a compliment. I had absolutely no intention of sounding like a salesman, but more like a peer who likes tags.

In the following three posts I will address each of the above issues and hope this helps others understand the power of tags implemented (and used) "right".

1. Using Tags as Traditional Folders
2. Maintaining Consistency with Tags
3. Tags sans Search

Despite Reid Hoffman leaving the post of LinkedIn CEO, I'm finally realizing how successful LinkedIn really is, and how much more success for it lies ahead. LinkedIn is, in my opinion, the best social network out there (haven't compared them to Xing, so maybe I haven't seen enough?). It's the best executed one. I've been using LinkedIn for a few years now, but my usage has, until now, been limited to sending or accepting invitations. As I've been getting more and more business proposals of all kinds via email, I found myself looking up people in LinkedIn. If you are a business person, and I can't find you in LinkedIn, something is fishy. If I can find you, then I can see where you've been, where you are, what you've done, and this can give me a decent idea about where you're headed, thus helping me understand you better. LinkedIn has, in essence, become my "Business People Locator", my "Who is Who in Business". No wonder LinkedIn Alexa chart looks so nice.

Hah, when I wrote that "Business People Locator", I remembered something I built over 10 years ago - POPULUS - The Intelligent People Locator (archive.org link), now rotting as a domain for sale. That project is still dear to my heart, so I just saved the logo I made for it back then.

Allen Stern runs CenterNetworks, a blog(-style) site with tech and business news, reviews, interviews, and such. You could compare it with TechCrunch, I suppose. Allen just published an interview with me about....hm, what? Simpy, of course. Allen was also kind enough to adorn his posts with the Simpy Feed Flare.