I tried and I keep trying to contact Del.icio.us about their problematic web service but they took a page from the Google book and they don't respond to their customers.
Sampa integrated Del.icio.us in December of last year. It was a pretty easy integration, they have a fairly simple and documented API, so it wasn't a pain, and we added some very neat twist to the integration: Bookmark via Email.
Sampa customers did start using the integration after all, you just needed to provide your username and password to integrate with Sampa.
The problem is that on an ordinary day we have anywhere from 50 to 100 failures calling the Del.icio.us API, always with the error: 503 Server Unavailable. If you go to their site they tell you how to play nice with the Del.icio.us service. We do that. We do everything. We even implement a mechanism to prevent more than 1 request per second, but it doesn't matter. We continue to get hundreds of errors per week.
That is not a great experience for our customer and Del.icio.us is not being responsive (or responsible as a matter of fact).
Does anyone that reads this blog had a similar experience? Do you know somebody in Del.icio.us that can help us investigate this issue?
You might not ever have noticed, but there are quite a few different ways to implement drop-down menus on websites.
First of all, on a Windows and on a Mac, all menus from all applications behave exactly the same. They can have multi-level sub-menus. When you click on a menu and it expands, it sticks there even if you take your mouse off the menu. If you click on another menu or anywhere else on the screen the menu closes (like contextual menus, a.k.a. right-click menus).
On the web there is no standard. Menus are implemented with Flash or Javascript and each site does a different thing. You have the case where menu expands automatically on mouse-over, or require a click, menus that close on mouse-out or click-out, menus that have arrows indicating submenus or not, etc.
For Sampa, I've made a very early decision that Menus would behave very similar to Windows' menus. Two basic reasons: First, users are used to its behavior, and, second, and more importantly, the Windows menu are very accessible and discoverable.
The problem with menus that disappear automatically on mouse-out (instead of on click-out) is that some users have difficulty keeping the mouse over the menu.
Why do I bring that up? From time to time, somebody, either a tech-savvy user or a newbie, complains about the way we do menus and our way is the least common on the web, but it is the easiest one, IMHO, for users.
Yesterday I received a letter in the mail from Adhost. They are a web hosting company in Seattle which I used to host my server at their facilities a few years ago.
I always had a pretty good experience with them. They are not a big shot hosting company, they were personal, provided a good service at a good price. I had to leave them for another hosting closer to my office in Redmond because going to Seattle every time I need to install a new server or do a hardware upgrade was a hassle.
So, in 2005 I left them.
The letter on the mail was long and explained that their customer database had been compromised by a hacker and they couldn't clearly figure out what was stolen, but to be on the safe side I should keep an eye on transactions on my credit card.
First of all, I commend them for being so upfront about it and quick at communicating it to customers.
But then I ask myself: I have not done any business with them for the past 2 years. Why they keep my information on their customers database and why the heck they keep my credit card number as well?
The answer is simple: most companies have a hard time letting it go of former customers. They want to make it easy for you to come back so they keep your account information active. They want to make it super easy for you to "buy" whatever they are offering, so they keep your credit card on record as well.
I think we would be safer if, voluntarily or by law, every business would erase your credit card / billing information after 18-24 months without any activity.
Now, for taxes purposes, some of that information cannot be permanently erased (only after 7 years), but they could definitely go "off-line" into some encrypted tape-backup at some accountants office, making it that much harder to steal.
Everyday I take my son to the daycare. In the 20-minute drive he always sleeps after about 10 minutes (he is only 14 months old). My wife and I don't like to wake him up when he is sleeping because he is like us, he gets in a very bad mood if somebody wakes him up and that ruins his days.
And what the heck does this story has to do with Crossing the Chasm? Simple: I read a book in the parking lot of the daycare while waiting for him to wake up and today I started reading Crossing the Chasm.
I bought this book a year ago. An investor recommended it to me. I bought it, read about 3 pages, closed it and said "it is not for me". Well, it was not at that time. I think this book is more focused on Startups that already have significant traction in a niche and want to go mainstream.
A year ago Sampa had no traction. We didn't have a public beta. Now things are different, we have significant more traction and are understanding each day a little bit more about our customer and the market. So I decided to give Crossing the Chasm another change.
I'm still not sure how well it translate into our business and at the stage we are in now, but it will be a good reading.
An investor asked us recently why we compute our viral rate in terms of registrations and not in terms of visits to Sampa.com.
In other words, we compute our viral rate based on the number of new sign ups to our system, not on the number of visits to our site.
We know of other companies that consider their viral rate how many people visited their site referred by another user.
Both methods are correct, it depends on which kind of website you have. For us, Sampa.com is not a destination site. Users go to www.sampa.com, sign up for the service and they are off editing their site on a different domain. So, tracking viral rate as the number of visits to Sampa.com makes very little sense.
On the other hand, a site like eBay, Google and MSNBC are destination sites. Traffic matters, visits matter, unique users matter.
For us, all that matters as well, but not on www.sampa.com.
Here I'm on my happy afternoon, almost code complete in a super cool feature when I take a break to read some blogs (200+ of them every day).
The big news is MySpace blocking PhotoBucket. This is super interesting for the business that I'm in, so I go ahead and read a few posts.
Michael Arrington on TechCrunch write a post called "Can PhotoBucket Survive Without MySpace?" (Shouldn't "without" be in lower case?). Bla, bla, bla, quote someotherbloggers, argues that PhotoBucket is a destination on itself, can survive on site ads, yada yada yada, then...
"...And many MySpace/Photobucket users will simply leave MySpace and go to one of its many competitors rather than lose the ability to embed their Photobucket media ..."
<johnstewartish>Wwwwhat??????</johnstewartish>
Are you kidding me Michael? (I'm sorry, Mr. Arrington -- we are not that close).
He continues...
"... Re-creating a profile at another social network takes a lot less time than re-uploading hours of video..."
I'm not sure where to start. Humm... Let's start by the obvious stuff.
Uploading a video takes longer than creating a profile on a Social Network. You win that. I say that buying bananas at the supermarket is faster than ordering a new Dell Server. Ha!
MySpace is not about pictures, videos or podcasting (anyone doing podcasting still?). MySpace is about people. Unless you get a good chunk of your friends to move with you to a new social network you are not leaving.
Contrary to normal people, like 99.9% of the population, Michael Arrington probably buys a new house and move across the city when his favorite organic market moves to another neighborhood, after all, it takes longer to get groceries every year than it takes to find and buy a new house, right?
Will MySpace users move to another social network? Maybe a tiny percentage that won't be enough to be a blip on MySpace management dashboard. More likely, users will start uploading videos to a new service or just add plain old links to their PhotoBucket stuff (I don't think MySpace will block links).
Can Photobucket survive without MySpace? Yes, but it got bruised really bad. They probably get a lot of their traffic from embedded widgets on MySpace and they are going to lose that, thus dramatically decreasing their revenue from ads.
Our binaries and all the necessary files to run Sampa keep growing. Right now, Sampa is a 20MB deployment. To transfer this data from our 768Kbps-uplink to the datacenter can take anywhere from 5 to 20 minutes.
Our deployment script would copy the content and deploy it as it was being copied. The problem with that strategy is that IIS doesn't have all the files ready to switch-over to the new version, so, between the first and last file notification it would take 2-3 minutes, thus, upgrading the Sampa site service would take the system "offline" for about 2-3 minutes. Well, the queue will not stay with a request for more than 90 seconds or so, so a lot of page requests were being dropped.
By doing a tiny change to the deployment script, we went from 2-3 minutes of downtime to 40 seconds!
All that we had to do was to copy the files to a temporary folder and from the temporary folder copy to the target folder. Works like a charm
I always wondered was most applications, during setup, don't copy the content from the CD to the disk and then install if from the disk. That would be so much faster instead of doing disk-seeks on a slow CD-ROM.
Subscribe to this Site
in December of last year. It was a pretty easy integration, they have a fairly simple and documented API, so it wasn't a pain, and we added some very neat twist to the integration: 
October, 2007