Simpy Chichimichi

If you are among the 5.36% Simpy Mac users, here is something for you/us - a brand new Simpy dashboard widget for OSX (there is a screenshot behind this links, too). The widget lets you search your Simpy bookmarks directly from OSX.

Thank you, Andu!

Once the memory upgrade is done, I think we'll all see even faster Simpy.

It's interesting, I've been watching the usage of Internet Explorer 6 vs. Internet Explorer 7 over on Simpy, waiting for the day when I can say that there are more Simpy IE7 users than IE6 users. Well, that day has come - it happened yesterday, actually. Over the last 30 days, of all Internet Explorer users, 50.05% were using IE7, and 49.39% were using using IE6. What's in the remaining half a percent? All kinds of older IE versions, of course, but also IE8. Yes, IE8 showed up on Simpy on March 6th, 2008 for the first time, and makes us for a whopping 0.01% of all Simpy IE users. I am sure this percentage will grow nicely in the coming month.

When you click on a bookmark tag, whether yours or somebody else's, you will see this gray box with several (3 currently) options that let you explore other areas of Simpy using that tag you just clicked on. Concretely, you can:

1. Simply look at everyone's bookmarks using the current tag
2. See the list of people who, based on the analysis of their bookmarks, look like they might know a thing or two about the current tag. We assume they are experts on the tag/topic, of course.
3. See the list of Groups that have something to do with the current tag you used

I circled 2 "experts" in the above example. The tag I was looking at was "subway". Simpy showed me several "subway experts". I don't know all those people, but I do know the two that I circled. I actually do know those two people in real life, they are good friends, and I happen to know they do know about subways (in New York). Thus, this is a good example of this little new feature actually providing something accurate and useful.

Any feedback? Thoughts? Room for improvement?

You can get Shareaholic from shareaholic.com or from the official Firefox add-ons site's shareaholic page.

1. I am really dropping adsense. Those who like Simpy for what it offers won't be bothered by this.
2. I am now also considering blocking bookmarks that enter Simpy via spam-infested services, such as OnlyWire, SocialPoster, social-bookmark-script.de and anyone else I come across. Are you using any of these services with Simpy? Let me know if you are.

There have been some improvements around search within a Group, too, so if you belong to any Groups, you will see search refining via Related Tags works now. Also, Group members now have their little icons shown next to their names, and clicking on those takes you to those people's profiles. Here is an example (look at the right side of the page).

How do you like having little icons next to people's names? Should Simpy have more of that in other areas of the site?

In a galaxy far far away, Simpy announced profit sharing with those people who enter their AdSense IDs in Simpy. Two years have passed and a number of people provided their IDs. However, recently I've noticed a trend of clueless or supposedly clueless people who choose to join Simpy purely (more or less) for this AdSense benefit. Long story short: I'm considering stopping this AdSense profit sharing business. Unless, by the following Friday somebody talks me out of stopping it, I'll axe it.

But let me ask you - what would you like to get from Simpy in 2008? What would make Simpy more useful to you? Here are some ideas. Post your wishes in comments!

• Better UI (e.g. less busy, cleaner look, more intuitive, etc.)
• More Social Network-like features (e.g. make it possible to add people to your network, to mark them as friends or contacts, to contact/message them directly from Simpy, etc.)
• Sorting by alphabet, click count, etc. (tell me which one is most important to you)
• More features in Groups (e.g. Group Notes, Group Messaging, something else?)
• More aggressive spam detection and removal
• More advanced Notes (e.g. Make them public, make it easy to post a Note to your blog, etc.)
• Better blog integration (e.g. automatically post your bookmarks to you blog every day, post Notes to your blog, etc.)
• Recommendations (i.e. recommend pages that you may like based on various things that Simpy knows about you)
• More information pushing via email (e.g. email recommended links on a nightly basis, email links from your Watchlist (Filters) on a nightly basis, email newly saved bookmarks in your Groups, etc.)
• Anything else?

This past Thursday was Thanksgiving Day in the U.S. This means people were eating turkey, cranberry sauce, (s)mashed potatoes, gravy, and pies. It also means that Web traffic world-wide was lower than usual.

I took the opportunity to make a few improvements to Simpy during this quiet period:

1. While spammers are still actively trying to post their links to Simpy, a lot of them are now hitting a dead end. Lots of them use automated tools, so it will probably take a little while for them to realize this. This change doesn't reduce spam, but it reduces the amount of resources used up by spammers, and that's a good thing for everyone but them.
2. Do you ever look at "Similar Users" section in your profile? I do. I have always been happy with how Simpy found people who are similar to me (e.g. see "Similar Users" in my profile), but I decided to make a little tweak to the algorithm that computes this similarity to see if it could be even better. The result: it is better - you will see better, more similar people on your Simpy profile now. Let me know what you think!
3. Better People Search! The side-effect of better similarity algorithm is a more precise People Search. Enter a few keywords/tags and you will find really good matches of people who know about whatever you searched for. Think of this as the window into finding experts on any given topic. For example, I co-authored a book called Lucene in Action. Guess who I find when I search for Lucene in Simpy? Erik Hatcher and Otis Gospodnetić -- the two co-authors of Lucene in Action!
4. Alphabetical sorting is coming! People have asked for this one, and it's ready. One of Simpy's servers is hard at work making the final changes needed for this feature as I type this. It should be done crunching early next week and then maybe the following weekend you should see this functionality on Simpy.
5. Another side-effect. Along with alphabetical sorting you will soon be able to slice your bookmarks by the starting letter of their title. In other words, you will be able to get all bookmarks starting with the letter A, all bookmarks starting with B, C, D, etc. My current plan is to simply provide a clickable "alphabet bar" above the list of your bookmarks: A B C D ... X Y Z 0 1 2 3 ... 9. The questions are: Should the result be sorting alphabetically within a letter? Or in reverses chronological order? Should limiting bookmarks by their starting letter be combined with search, so you can search within all bookmarks starting with a given letter? (I currently don't see a great need for this.) Please let me know how you would like this to work!
6. Have you created any Groups in Simpy? If you have, go edit them, make them public, make them open (let people join without an invitation), go add a nice, good description, add some good and relevant tags, and make sure you picked good names for your bookmarks. The searchable Groups Index is coming!

That is all for now. Please comment if you have feedback!