Simpy Chichimichi

For those interested in the business facet of Simpy, here is the interview with O.G. of Simpy.com that was just published.

Several days ago CrispAds blog advertising network that I have never heard of before, put itself up on eBay for sale. The starting price was $90,000 USD. The auction closed earlier today with the closing price of.... $90,000 USD. No bids were placed. Failed attempt to sell.

How come there was so little/no interest? They even got a mention on TechCrunch the other day, which must have created some awareness.

Is this the first Web-2.0-eBay-Sale failure?

Since Simpy makes a ton of money, just like last year, Simpy will be an official BarCampNYC sponsor. Spread the wealth!

If you want to say hello or chat about something else, the Simpy dude looks like this.

There is another area where volunteer help would be greatly appreciated. Simpy could really use some help with internationalization/translation to non-English languages. Currently, there is an English version, and a Croatian version. The switch to the appropriate translation happens auto-magically (browser's Accept-Language headers are the key here). English is clearly still the dominant language on the Web, but I would love for Simpy to be available in other languages - not everyone speaks English.

So, I'm looking for volunteers for translation to any language. Here is the current list of top 6 languages that Simpy visitors speak (ignore the numbers, they don't represent real traffic, although they do show relative language 'popularity'):

1. 22110 en (English)
2. 2327 de (German)
3. 2012 pt (Portuguese)
4. 1793 fr (French)
5. 1765 es (Spanish)
6. 1465 zh (Chinese)

Of these languages, I noticed that Portuguese is growing very strong lately. Spanish is also coming up, while Chinese, surprisingly, recently fell from second/third spot to number 6.

If you are interested in translating from English to any other language, please let me know. I'd love to have translations, and I'd love to give credit to volunteers.

Update: only 345,678,987 hours later and we're back up. Some of the caches got flushed, but it looks like that's not hurting anyone. The plan didn't work out, so I'll have to give it another go in the near future.

It was getting late (note the long egg shadows), so I left the call to Apple Care for tomorrow. Ready to call Apple, I jumped out of bed the following morning. To my surprise the eggs were gone, and there were no signs of hatchlings. But I did find something else - 5 new laptops of different varieties.

My 5 little eggs turned into a MacBook, a pair of ThinkPads, a PowerBook, and a Toshiba (not depicted).

Thank you, Apple!

On the other hand, if you don't want a new full-time job right now, but would like to hack on some social/tagging/search software, let me know. Simpy has a few tens of thousand users, several million bookmarks, and about five times that many tags, numerous groups, watchlists, watchlist filters, notes, etc., so there is plenty of data to play with. Contrary to the popular belief, Simpy is a one man show, which means "will hack for fun, fame and maybe fortune, not salary".

What does it take to work on Simpy? Solid Java skills, knowledge of SQL, experience with Hibernate, Lucene, familiarity with Struts (yeah, unbelievable) and JSTL. Neatness - I hate messy code, even if it does the job correctly. Experience with distributed server setups and scalable architectures is a plus. If you are interested, inquire within. Of course, who's got time for such extracurricular activities.

I'm with Nick and the critics on this. It's not even about quality, it's about "why"? Why do I need to use these sites? And even if I do use them, why would I use them every day?

Most people want to spend less time in front of a computer, not more. They want to find a way to spend more time actually interacting in-person with their current friends, not more time making lists or finding new friends via a web site.

Those who know me know I often complain about the short 24-hour days, and I'm not alone. I always have too much to do, and too little time. My todo list is always long. My whiteboard is never clean and white. This madness has to end. End of the post.