Simpy Chichimichi

Do you use Firefox? If you do, read the following.

If you haven't used Andu's Firefox extension for Simpy before, I'd describe it as a Firefox extension that makes both saving and searching of your Simpy bookmarks directly from Firefox very simple, smooth, and natural. If you are using Andu's Simpy extension, you will not need Simpy bookmarklets. Besides saving and searching, you can also quickly get to your profile page, to Simpy front page, you can see Simpy's link history for the page you are on with a single click. This extension also adds the "right-click" context menu items that let you bookmark to Simpy with ease.

Andu just released a new version of his Firefox extension for Simpy. This new version is waiting to get listed on the Mozilla Add-on site, but while we wait for it to appear there (it looks like it could take a while - weeks), you can install the extension directly from Andu's announcement post. Just save that simpy.xpi file on your computer and then open it with your Firefox browser by going to File -> Open file menu. This version works with both Firefox 1.5 and Firefox 2.*.

The new version has some nice changes - it installs both the link and note search plugins for Firefox (see also: Firefox 2.0 Open Search Discovering Simpy), has prettier icons, the installation process automatically puts some of the icons in your existing Firefox toolbar -- this is important -- this extension doesn't add yet another toolbar to your browser and does not consume more of your valuable screen space!

The full Changelog is available from Andu's announcement post. Thank you, Andu!

Are you hungry? Like snakes? How about pies? How about snake pies? I'm asking because Benjamin just made a nice python pie, as you can see over at simpytools.sf.net. He released Simpy.py 1.1 the other day and announced it a few days ago. He also diligently updated its Freshmeat entry. He summarized all of that in his message on simpy-dev list.

Probably the biggest change in version 1.1 is that Simpy.py is now rleased under both the Apache Software License 2.0 and LGPL 2.1.

If you don't know what Simpy.py is, let me explain quickly - Simpy.py is a free client library that makes it possible for your Python application to "talk to" Simpy's REST API. How would you use Simpy.py? Benjamin has a few examples for you.

Thank you, Benjamin, you are a great example of what a good community member can be like.

A few months back, there was a lot of talk about Jimmy Wales' new idea - the Wikia Search. The idea behind this search engine is/was that it would (somehow) be "community-driven" (vague - what exactly does that mean?). I believe the other part of the idea is that the search engine software to run this engine would be best on Nutch and Lucene (something I know a little about, and provide consulting services).

Lots of talk, but as far as I can tell, nothing came out of it yet. There is a (now pretty inactive) mailing list that never included more than very high-level and unorganized discussion (check archives from March, February, and January for examples). As Simpy's dad, I also emailed Jimmy and offered help. I never heard back from Jimmy. Busy man, I'm sure. However, everything I've seen so far makes me thing the Wikia Search is either not going to happen any time soon, or maybe not at all. Does anyone have any more information about it?

Microsoft and Ask have recently joined Google and Yahoo in their Sitemaps support. Simpy has been using sitemaps functionality for a while now, and 4 days ago the sitemaps info was also added to its robots.txt. However, guess what? Since then, only Googlebot and Yahoo Slurp have paid Simpy's sitemap files a visit. Since the beginning of this month, Googlebot picked the main sitemap file 4 times, while Yahoo's Slurp picked it up 10 times (split between their U.S. Slurp and their China Slurp).

Ask and Microsoft are nowhere to be found. No wonder they are losing web search market share!

1)	235	bbw porno (page 1)
2)	125	footjob video (page 1)
3)	120	gay sexx (page 1)
4)	106	incest forums (page 2)
5)	104	porno bbw (page 1)
6)	88	sex bbw (page 1)
7)	84	incest forums (page 3)
8)	83	footjob video (page 2)
9)	73	simpy (page 1)
10)	69	disney toon sex (page 1)
11)	65	sexx gay (page 1)
12)	62	incest porno (page 1)
13)	51	porno fat (page 1)
14)	48	forum incest (page 2)
15)	40	porno toons (page 1)
16)	40	incest forum (page 4)
17)	39	toon sex (page 3)
18)	38	incest forum (page 3)
19)	37	toon sex (page 4)
20)	35	incest forums (page 4)

I'm surprised. You? Only #9 makes sense. I have no idea why these keywords would lead people here .... oh, oh, I see now. In the past this blog didn't have good comment anti-spam setup (it has now!). This resulted in a lot of comment spam with various porn links and keywords. That's why people are finding this blog when searching for those keywords. Well, thank god or spammers, or else this blog might never have surfaced in Google.

If it's not obvious from my posts here, I love numbers and charts, especially when they relate to web traffic, page views, visitors, and other web-related metrics. Having just posted about Alexa, Compete, and Quantcast, and their U.S. bias, I went over to Alexa's blog and found this interesting post from a few days ago. If you want to learn about some of Alexa deficiencies, just read the comments.

Here is a good example of how "inaccurate" (U.S.-biased) Alexa, Compete, and Quantcast are. Xing is a popular social networking service much like LinkedIn. LinkedIn is very popular in the U.S., while Xing is very popular outside the U.S., mainly in Europe. They recently announced they have 2 million users, just like Simpy (heh). You'd imagine some pretty impressive numbers and charts from Alexa, Compete, and Quantcast, right? Unfortunately, no. All three services are so biased towards the U.S.-only visitors, that Xing's numbers look pretty bad: Alexa, Compete, Quantcast. Ouch!

Xing is clearly not alone. A good portion of Simpy's users are non-American. This is not surprising - Simpy has been translated to a number of languages. If you look at simpy-user or simpy-dev lists, you will notice people from (Western) European dominate in numbers/activity.

Sure, the services clearly state that the numbers they show reflect only U.S. visitors, but what good is that? That's like reporting the population of the planet Earth at about 300 million and saying "but this represents only the U.S.". Give us the rest!

Simpy will be offline for maintenance starting at 00:30 EDT tonight. The service should be restored by 01:00 EDT.

I have a couple of great Simpy announcements to share on this lovely Sunday. I cannot hold it back any longer, so let me just get it out of my system:

1. Early next week Simpy will welcome its 2 millionth member.
2. The number of bookmarks stored in Simpy is growing rapidly and will cross the 250 million (yeah, quarter of a billion!) mark sometime around the middle of next week.

This is a great milestone for Simpy, especially since Simpy is only my side project. Simpy is not a full-time business with a large team and venture capitalist funding. I am extremely proud and happy to share these numbers publicly. Some have advised me to keep this a secret as long as possible, keep the low profile, but it is very had keeping this locked inside, even if it makes business sense. I hope these numbers will encourage all the dreamy entrepreneurs out there - it is possible to run a Web 2.0 service cheaply and still make it huge without taking outside funding. I will write an essay about what it takes to accomplish this and publish it on this blog.

To all the Simpy members out there - thank you, thank you, thank you!