Simpy Chichimichi

Regular Simpy users know some new gear was put in place about a month ago. When that happened I wanted to post some charts that show the dramatic performance improvements, just like I posted performance charts after some tuning and performance charts after some caching. After that tuning and caching was done, I went to see Simpy's performance chart on GrabPERF and found it right behind Technorati and Google (see Technorati - Google - Simpy)! Needless to say, I was very pleased. This was about 9-10 months ago.

So, if I was very pleased back then, when Simpy was the third fastest site monitored by GrabPERF, imagine my joy when I saw Simpy ahead of Google, Technorati, del.icio.us, Amazon.... While Simpy is regularly ahead of del.icio.us, Google is almost always in that #1 spot. However, not today - Simpy was a whole 0.03 seconds ahead of Google, and I have a screenshot to prove it:

What is even more interesting and more exciting for me, is that Simpy performed this well while working extra hard after being included in the story about The Top 10 Underrated Web 2.0 Sites (apparently Simpy falls in the Underrated category, at least for some folks). This story that made it to Digg's home page, and we all know what that means. Did I mentioned you should go digg that story and help it stay on Digg's front page a little longer (e.g. Monday morning)?

Do you ever wonder how many of your bookmarks (in Simpy or wherever you keep your bookmarks) are broken? How many are dead and are now useless? How many have a new location and now redirect to that new location?

While Simpy has this functionality almost since the beginning, it is currently (temporarily?) turned off. However, Vince Tagle (profile) comes to the rescue with his dead.alicious , an application whose main goal is checking your Simpy (or del.icio.us or ma.gnolia) links. Once broken links are found, you can fix them or simply remove them directly from the application. This application is free and runs on Apple's OSX.

Needless to say (so I'll say it anyway), dead.licious makes good use of Simpy's rich REST API. Good job, Vince, and thank you for dead.licious!

Just a couple of days ago, Matthew Turland (profile) announced his Zend_Service_Simpy - "a lightweight wrapper for the free REST API available for the Simpy social bookmarking service." Matt has been diligently working on this and made sure to be done with his Zend_Service_Simpy in time to get it included in the 0.9.0 release of the popular Zend Framework.

In very practical terms the creation of Zend_Service_Simpy means that if you are using PHP, and you want to talk to Simpy to either save or retrieve (or delete) some data (bookmarks, tags, notes...), you can use Zend Framework and Matt's Zend_Service_Simpy to do this, without having to hack your own PHP code for talking to Simpy -- Matt did all the hard work already in his Zend_Service_Simpy.

Thank you Matt!

A bit over a month ago I said Alexa still beats Compete and Quantcast. I take it back! Towards the end of 2006 Alexa was showing Simpy's relative traffic rate fairly accurately. However, since the beginning of 2007, it has been completely off! Simpy is doing better than ever, getting more page views and more users than ever, yet Alexa's chart is has a downward slope! How wrong! On the other hand, Compete and Quantcast show more accurate relative traffic. Unfortunately, both Comepete's and Quancast's estimate of Simpy's unique visitors is very inaccurate (orders of magnitude lower than the actual number of unique visitors). Quantcast updates its data faster than Compete. It's the middle of March, and Compete just updated their charts to reflect February traffic. I am still hoping they will be able to update their data and charts on a daily or at least weekly basis without requiring site owners to include that traffic-measuring pixel in their pages. A month is a long time to wait for those of us who love numbers and charts.

Do you use LinkedIn? Are you curious how fast LinkedIn is growing? I am, and I just learned about the growth rate: a new user signs up every 16 minutes, which comes to about 130,000 new users per week. Not bad! Where did I get these numbers? From Dan Nye, the new CEO of LinkedIn. You can see him on BlogTV #35 1/3, starting around 6:30 minutes into the video.

See also LinkedIn - The Who is Who in Business.

I noticed most Simpy members with @optushome.com.au email addresses are spammers. The company behind optushome.com.au seems to be an Australian cable service provider (like TimeWarner or Cablevision in the U.S., for example). But why is it so full of spammers? Of course, just because these people provided @optushome.com.au email addresses it doesn't mean that they really are the owners of those addresses -- some of those emails bounce. But why optushome.com.au??? I'd love to know! Do you know?