Comments on: Checked out Sponit tonight

By: shaz

shaz — Mon, 12 Dec 2005 20:51:17 +0000

we’re actually thinking about writing our own standard — something similar to rss that will plug into rss. the problem with rss is that it doesn’t organize posts in a manner conducive to sponit.

another addition you might find interesting is the messaging feature. this will allow you to message other posters privately. the messages will be linked to the posts.

the final version of sponit you’ll see next week won’t be significantly different, but it will have alot of additions that we currently don’t have on the site. two of which are tags and messages. we’ll be doing many other things this weekend to make the site better so please save your final impressions until we release.

also if you’ve been having trouble accessing the site, please keep trying. our server has been crashing and we’re in the process of moving from $5/month hosting to a nice dedicated server. we hope to be on the dedicated tonight — for all you gurus out there, we’ll be running our own compiled version of gentoo.

By: TDavid

TDavid — Mon, 12 Dec 2005 20:00:37 +0000

Hi shaz - thanks for stopping by and commenting (the dupe was removed). Glad to hear about tags, what about RSS?

By: shaz

shaz — Mon, 12 Dec 2005 19:38:34 +0000

i think we’re solving the problem you present because we’re implementing tags this weekend. we think that’ll increase visitation because it’ll allow people to find specifically what they want. also, the odds you speak of, are in fact better overall than a traditional blog site. if you setup an account with xanga, blogger, etc your visitation is worse if not way worse than our visitation — especially if you only make one post. this is just what we’ve been thinking about…this is a good dialog tho

sorry it submitted my un-proofread version when i pressed return for some reason.

By: TDavid

TDavid — Mon, 12 Dec 2005 14:09:29 +0000

yuri - do the math, how do you figure you can get “way more visitation than on regular blogs”? Let’s say there are 1,000 pages and 5,000 people surfing (which there isn’t even close to that much exposure there yet). The average person surfing surfs how many pages? 5 pages? That means there is a 1:200 chance that surfer will see your page. Even if they search 50 pages, that’s still 1:20. Now what if there are 10,000 pages? It jumps to 1:2000 and 1:200. Now how about 100,000 pages? Now you are talking 1:20000, and 1:2000.

The more pages, the less likely the person will see your page. The more people, the less pages, the more likely a person will see your page. That’s basic mathematics. What are you seeing here that I’m not?

Compare that to coming to your blog through a search engine and there is a much greater chance that person will see your page (especially if your on the first page in the SE). Sponit is going to need a ton — and I mean a ton — of traffic to an individual page the amount of traffic that one would get on their own or by using another already more popular search that has the traffic.

And I’m not sure where they get that people “hate posting to blogs” — where is that crowd when there are millions and millions of blogs already out there (and more being created every day) and tools that make it ridiculously easy to post?

The other problem is that people are not going to surf through the same pages over and over again. Sponit needs to work out something that doesn’t show the same page to the same person over and over again and currently that’s not happening, it’s just being randomized. Random is cool if it randomly shows folks something they haven’t seen already.

By: yuri stanzler

yuri stanzler — Mon, 12 Dec 2005 07:03:50 +0000

well i dunno if i think that your review is necessarily right. i mean the site is pretty cool because you can get way more visitation than on regular blogs. i mean alot of people out there hate posting multiple times or just want to post something funny once.