Random thoughts
Well the price hike seems to have gone without a hitch..probably didn't hurt that we dropped shiny features in there at the same time. note to self :)
The Bug We Won't Mention not withstanding, everything seems to be moving fairly smoothly. I was only out 2 credits overnight, nothing too serious.
Quite a few new users joining up today. The rate of joining appears to be smoothly climbing upwards. Quick aside:
If you ever find yourself in our seat trying to start something like this up, you'll find yourself in a rather bizarre position as far as signups go. The whole system really depends on picking up sufficient participants that it becomes self-sustaining, as do many apps of this nature. That's fine, you know that when you go into it.
What you don't know is:
1. You don't realise you have *no idea* what number "self-sustaining" actually is. It's not like a business where it's basically $x/month or you're sunk, we're trying to predict "motivation", "curiosity", "novelty" and a vast array of other intangible variables in judging what precisely will work. It's just too early to tell.
2. You desperately want lots of people. Every "shiny new" application has a "honeymoon period", that is a period during which users are patient with faults and generally enthusiastic about the concept. We're definitely in that period, people have been saying positive things everywhere we're looking. What we don't know is how long our honeymoon is, and what will happen when it's over - will we still look good? we're racing to bring in features we know should be there in the hopes that as people settle down to us as simply part of their lives, that we'll still be valuable enough to hang out with.
3. You not entirely sure you really want lots of people. We engineered from the beginning to deal with popular blogs, our use of services like Amazon S3, nettica and other high availability, high performance services are a direct result of our understanding that nothing we do should ever, *ever* slow down our users sites. Many of our users make their livelihood from their blogs, there's no chance we're going to do anything that risks that for them.
At the same time, there's this nervous sense that it's simply not possible to predict what 10,000 people might do. We're not anywhere near that yet, but I've worked on popular systems before, I know exactly what an exponential curve looks like, and they're sneaky like a ninja.
I very much doubt it'll ever cause problems with the widgets, those things have been optimised to hell, but the more dynamic parts of the system like the statistics and analysis stuff...well, it doesn't keep me awake at night but I can't help but be conscious of it whenever our user numbers jump suddenly :)
The Bug We Won't Mention not withstanding, everything seems to be moving fairly smoothly. I was only out 2 credits overnight, nothing too serious.
Quite a few new users joining up today. The rate of joining appears to be smoothly climbing upwards. Quick aside:
If you ever find yourself in our seat trying to start something like this up, you'll find yourself in a rather bizarre position as far as signups go. The whole system really depends on picking up sufficient participants that it becomes self-sustaining, as do many apps of this nature. That's fine, you know that when you go into it.
What you don't know is:
1. You don't realise you have *no idea* what number "self-sustaining" actually is. It's not like a business where it's basically $x/month or you're sunk, we're trying to predict "motivation", "curiosity", "novelty" and a vast array of other intangible variables in judging what precisely will work. It's just too early to tell.
2. You desperately want lots of people. Every "shiny new" application has a "honeymoon period", that is a period during which users are patient with faults and generally enthusiastic about the concept. We're definitely in that period, people have been saying positive things everywhere we're looking. What we don't know is how long our honeymoon is, and what will happen when it's over - will we still look good? we're racing to bring in features we know should be there in the hopes that as people settle down to us as simply part of their lives, that we'll still be valuable enough to hang out with.
3. You not entirely sure you really want lots of people. We engineered from the beginning to deal with popular blogs, our use of services like Amazon S3, nettica and other high availability, high performance services are a direct result of our understanding that nothing we do should ever, *ever* slow down our users sites. Many of our users make their livelihood from their blogs, there's no chance we're going to do anything that risks that for them.
At the same time, there's this nervous sense that it's simply not possible to predict what 10,000 people might do. We're not anywhere near that yet, but I've worked on popular systems before, I know exactly what an exponential curve looks like, and they're sneaky like a ninja.
I very much doubt it'll ever cause problems with the widgets, those things have been optimised to hell, but the more dynamic parts of the system like the statistics and analysis stuff...well, it doesn't keep me awake at night but I can't help but be conscious of it whenever our user numbers jump suddenly :)
Labels: entrecard
posted by PhiRatE at
4:19 PM
1 Comments:
entrcard is spreading good since most blogger who join this network will blog about it and continue to spread virally.
when will this novelty slow down depends on the bloggers, if they decide not to log in to approve ads anymore, more and more credits spent on pending ads which never run... people will not be motivated to earn credits anymore.
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