Simpy Chichimichi

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!