http://blog.wikispaces.com/2008/03/wikispaces-turns-three.html

The short version: 920K users, 390K wikis. 26M pageviews last month, 200M last year. Woo!

It’s exciting times at our little company: we’re growing like crazy, hiring, and generally having a great time. Know a great developer or two? Send them our way!

No Flash, no ajax, no hard-to-read maps or graphics. Just text, good highlighting, and a compact horizontal layout.

A long wait and a short ride later, we were dropped off at the Sprayview Hotel, which gave us our first indication of the economic situation in Zimbabwe. The country has experienced a lot of difficulty over the past several years including political unrest, massive breakdowns in agricultural production and major industries, and rampant inflation — currently in the neighborhood of 9000%. Shortly before we went, the government created a $200K bill, printed on only one side to save ink. It’s extremely difficult to get supplies and recent import restrictions and pricing requirements have only made the situation worse.

The Sprayview is on the outskirts of town and most definitely does not have a view of the spray from the Falls. The hotel was clearly a lovely place a few decades ago, but it was very much showing signs of decline. The rooms were old and in disrepair, the pool was suspiciously cloudy, and they had only four of the 20+ items on the restaurant menu. Despite these difficult conditions, we could not have asked for a more friendly and attentive staff. James felt like a king drinking $60,000 beers pool-side.

We had dinner at the hotel with Kiwis Ian and Edna who we’d met at the airport and would be traveling with us in Botswana. Amanda had the fish for $950,000 (talk about sticker shock!) and we enjoyed a bottle of wine while watching our dinner-side entertainment. Once they broke into “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” and “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”, we knew we’d be passing on the CD.

Tommorrow on Survivor: Botswana, and getting stranded in the bush without our guide or supplies! (Really, we’re not kidding!)

Elsa’s a professional driver in a city known for horrible traffic and frequent carjackings. She drove like it — a white-knuckle combination of knowing lots of local shortcuts, a heavy foot, and a casual disregard for traffic laws we tend to adhere to in the US. Conversation under these circumstances was a bit hit-or-miss.

We checked in to Cloud’s End Bed & Breakfast in the Melville neighborhood and were soon picked up for a tour of Soweto (South West Township). Our guide, Thabo, gave us a great history of the township and the anti-apartheid movement on the way out of the center of Johannesburg. We drove past huge slag heaps left over from a bygone age of gold mining, roadside fires, and endless construction. The City of Gold looks a bit now like the City of Cranes as they frantically prepare for the World Cup in 2010. (I’ll be happy to take bets on whether the monorail is done in time. I’m betting against. - James)

The tour included a stop at the Hector Pieterson Museum (highly recommended shorter alternative to the famous Apartheid Museum) and swings past the homes of Winnie Mandela and Bishop Desmond Tutu, both of whom still live in Soweto. One of the notable local construction projects is the creation of huge amounts of public housing to try and improve living conditions in Joburg’s outlying slums. We passed a collection of these shacks, a patchwork of corregated tin, brick, and wood - living conditions that must truly be awful.

Just before our jet-lag-induced early bedtime, we headed over to the main strip of Melville for dinner. We were startled to find a street that would have been perfectly at home in San Francisco — clubs, bistros, more restaurants than we could pick from all packed into a few short blocks. After a lovely dinner at an Italian restaurant, it was straight to bed to try and get our tired bodies nine hours ahead of San Francisco time.

Next up: Zimbabwe, land of hyperinflation and baffling border bureaucracy.

We chose the San Francisco - London - Johannesburg route on Virgin Atlantic because both flights were direct and avoided a layover somewhere in the US. And also because of Virgin’s seat-back entertainment systems.

First up: we took a 12-hour red-eye from San Francisco and arrived in London’s Heathrow at 10:30 am. We had an eight hour layover, so we hopped on the Tube to meet our friends Sarah and Dave at Piccadilly Circus. Somehow we missed the forecast for rain — rain in London? madness! — so we got drenched. We had a lovely lunch at Tiger Tiger catching up with both of them. Sarah had to go back to work, so Dave kept us awake and moving with a walk to Trafalgar Square and some time in the National Portrait Gallery. Just before rush hour we got back on the Tube and trekked back to Heathrow for another red eye flight to Jo’burg.

No photos for this leg. I did try to take a few pictures of the architecture of the National Portrait Gallery, ignorant of the rules. I’m happy to report that even a stern verbal warning sounds better in a British accent.

Next up: Johannesburg, the City of Gold. And car-jackings. And caustic smog. Fun!

We’ll be posting more about our trip here over the next week, with a little background on each place we visited. But first, we’ve put together an album of our favorite photos from the whole trip. Enjoy!

Our Favorite Africa Photos

We’re now fortunate to be in a position where we’re profitable, growing fast, and hiring. We’ve got a big opportunity ahead of us and a lot of work to do, especially in developing our service and getting the word out.

If you’re a sharp software engineer or savvy marketer - or know someone who is - we want to talk to you. Read more about the positions here:

http://tangient.com/jobs.html

Want to know more? Drop me an email or give me a call anytime.

• Full normalization between RSS and Atom
• Complete Atom 1.0 support
• Enclosure support (MP3s and videos found in feeds)
• Straightforward caching plugins
• Active development, lots of unit tests, BSD licensing

SimplePie’s not perfect — we’ll likely be logging issues about error logging and feed URL scrubbing - but I think it’s well on the way to becoming the go-to PHP feed parser.

If you’re a SourceForge project admin, head over to your admin section now and enable your wiki!

On October 24, Apple announced a new line with Core 2 Duos and other upgrades.

This afternoon, by sheer chance, I noticed that Amazon had dropped the price of the model I bought by a few hundred dollars. I sent customer support a request to refund the difference - why not?

Six hours later, a friendly email arrives in my inbox. Refund granted.

Amazon does something amazing: they combine the purchasing power and logistical expertise of a massive retailer with the kind of customer support you can expect from a neighborhood store. I get my impulse purchases overnight for a few bucks (Amazon Prime), competitive pricing, a monster selection. Except for niche purchases, I’m finding it harder and harder to shop anywhere else online.

After week one, I’m still thrilled with the new MacBook Pro. Careful chronologers will note that just four days after UPS dropped off my laptop, Apple released its upgraded MacBook Pro line with Core 2 Duos and bigger disks - and FireWire 800, if I ever needed to plug in a big disk array? But no matter, I’m feeling good with my now just-barely-obsolete laptop.

And now to revisit a favorite topic for probably every PC-to-Mac-switching blogger: essential Mac applications, with a developer’s bias.

• Quicksilver

- A mind-reading application launcher and so much more. Get it, seriously.

• Firefox

- The new 2.0 theme looks great next to native OS X apps.

• Mail.app

- Whaa?! No Thunderbird? Not for now. Mail.app is just smoother. We’ll see if it lasts.

• Adium

- Great cross-service IM.

• TextMate

- For single file editing or more involved projects, I’ve been very impressed with TextMate. We’ll see if I find the need for something heavier like Eclipse.

• VirtueDesktops

- Smooth and pretty multiple desktop manager.

• Parallels

- Keeps Debian and Windows XP running in the background. Watch out though, VMWare for Mac is coming.

• iTerm

- The standard OS X terminal is good, but when you’ve got lots of shells open, tabs are a big help.

Yes, five years.

I’ve been putting this off for a while.

Now, the ThinkPad was a good laptop - great, maybe - and it did everything I asked of it and more. I’d guess 15,000 to 20,000 hours of use, a number of trips around the globe, and more than two drop-kicks in the office parking lot. My daily routine centered around Firefox, Thunderbird, SecureCRT, VMWare (debian), and lately, FeedDemon under Windows XP. It was the only computer I used both at home and at work.

But time had taken its toll. A few days before the three year warrantee expired, the motherboard failed. IBM was happy to replace nearly everything in the system except the screen and hard drive, which I swapped out for a faster model. But after that, the speakers starting failing, suspending or hibernating XP became a gamble, and the built-in ethernet went south. In the end, though, Javascript was the laptop’s undoing. When the web was just a pile of HTML and images with a sprinking of code, my old laptop did great. When trying to parse and execute a few hundred KB of Javascript code every time I fired up GMail, my laptop ground to a halt.

I toyed with the idea of getting a Dell (”dude…”), but fell for the seductive simplicity, fast hardware, and BSD-backing of a MacBook Pro: 2 GHz Core Duo, 2GB RAM. Two days in, I think I’ve made the right choice. QuickSilver is waiting to read my mind, I’ve got Darwin Ports building the latest PHP5, Firefox is snappy, Parallels has a fresh install of debian, and everthing feels right, a feeling I’ve long missed in the land of Windows.

MogileFS, for the unanointed, is a specialized distributed filesystem originally built to power LiveJournal. Like its siblings memcached and perlbal, Mogile is open source software. True distributed filesystems are unweildy and complex; Mogile makes a number of assumptions and simplifications that make it easy to deploy, fast, and developer-friendly. Mogile doesn’t mount like a traditional UNIX filesystem (though in the summit, we saw a demo of a FUSE+webdav mount hack) and stores files based on a flat domain / key structure. It’s up to the application using Mogile to add files via a simple API, enforce permissions, map keys to filenames if needed, and query for and cache the locations of stored files. Where Mogile shines is replicating files across pools of cheap, usually non-RAID disk arrays and handling drive and device failures, some level of capacity balancing, and future growth. Mogile really nails a sweet spot for the kind of storage problems many websites face. At Wikispaces, we’ve got millions of files in Mogile and it has been rock-solid since day one.

We spent the majority of the summit talking about what’s coming in Mogile 2 - which is already partially running in production for LiveJournal - and what’s on people’s minds for future releases. Aside from a number of code cleanup and performance enhancements, big changes in Mogile 2 include a new plugin architecture and pluggable replication rules. In Mogile 1.x, replication was controlled by a “mindevcount” setting, the minimum number of devices that a file had to be stored on. In Mogile 2, you can write a replication ruleset that mandates files span racks, datacenters, a certain number of fast systems, etc. Best of all, Mogile 2 is API-compatible with Mogile 1.x, so we can drop it in on the fly.

To Brad, Junior, and everyone from SixApart who’s hacking on Mogile, memcached, and friends - thanks! It was an awesome summit.

Today we’re thrilled to announce a program to give away 100,000 wikis (usually $5/month) for use in K-12 education. For free. No strings attached.

We’re doing this after hearing amazing stories of teachers trying wikis in their classrooms over the last year. There’s a huge demand for simple technology in education, not bloated and complex software that scares away teachers and students alike. Better still, we don’t want to put price pressure on educators - too many teachers already have to make impossible choices about the tools they can afford to bring into their classrooms.

For a small company, 100,000 is a big number - and we need your help. Help in telling teachers, journalists, school staff, and educational technologists about what we’re trying to do. Email them our blog post, post one of our progress trackers on your blog or website (like the thermometer to the right of this post), or just share our story with a friend. With any luck, we’ll look back at 100,000 as just the beginning.

Four months later, the 7105t met a watery grave at the bottom of the San Francisco Bay after a nighttime sailing mishap. I got sad. Then I got an 8700g.

Now I understand crackberry addiction. The full keyboard is a big part - SureType is very good, but just doesn’t compare. Whatever Intel xScale processor they crammed into this thing is fast, far faster than the 7105t. Web pages scream via EDGE and T-Mobile’s unlimited data plan price is right - $19 a month. But with both the 7105t and 8700g I struggled to figure out what apps I needed to get, what my best option was for setting up email forwarding, and what tricks I could use to be more productive. I read forums, I read blogs, I scoured search engines, and I came up with only a few answers.

What’s still missing on the web is a great reference site for all things BlackBerry. BlackBerry Forums is the closest thing - a great discussion site, but reference information is lost in a sea of comments and sticky posts.

So I’ve started a wiki over at Wikispaces to gather links, pictures, tips, and anything else BlackBerry users deem important in one easy-to-edit spot.

Got a BlackBerry? Join in.

Now you might be thinking: “well, duh - I can do that with any wiki that supports HTML.” But we chose to do embedded media in a smarter way.

If you’re just pasting HTML in your wiki page, you’ll see something like this when editing your page:

<embed
style=”width:400px; height:326px;”
id=”VideoPlayback”
type=”application/x-shockwave-flash”
src=”http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=-8224040487342942414″>

Not so pretty, and really confusing for other people who might be editing your page. Put ten of these on a page, and you’ve got a real mess.

Here’s what the same embed looks like on Wikispaces:

[[media type=”google” key=”-8224040487342942414″]]

YouTube?

[[media type=”youtube” key=”UnFV-fvgOu0″]]

Nice and clean. Paste in a URL instead of the embedded HTML code and we’ll convert it automatically into the correct tag. Paste in something we don’t yet understand and we’ll add it to our database for the future.

Long-time Wikispaces user Sean FitzGerald has a great demo page showing what happens when you unleash media on wiki pages. Awesome!

I suggested in a comment that the issue might be LinkedIn’s exclusive use of SSL, where Alexa doesn’t track impressions. A few months later I noticed that the SSL had gone away, and LinkedIn’s Alexa traffic has gone from a dribble to a torrent:

I thought of this today as I read a pretty hyperbolic Hitwise headline: “MySpace Moves Into #1 Position for all Internet Sites“. By any reasonable definition of “MySpace”, “Yahoo”, and “internet site”, this just isn’t so. Jeremy Zawodny calls it “Apples and Oranges“. I’ll go with lies, damn lies, and web traffic statistics.

The takeaway is that website traffic follows a power law distribution. The top 4 or so sites on the web do orders of magnitude more traffic than the next 40, who do orders of magnitude more traffic than the next 400, and so on. By just about any measure, Digg and flickr are enormously successful sites - but you wouldn’t know it if you took a quick look at a graph of them compared to MySpace. So next time you look at Alexa, remember, it’s all relative.

I mentioned in my Tale of the Tape intro that it’s a bad idea to take Alexa stats out of context. Here’s a great reminder. I’m going to show you five sites’ Alexa reach plotted over a two year period. Three have a classic hockey-stick growth curve, one just in the last few months. Two don’t look so hot, nearly flat over this time period.

Your challenge: name these five sites.

To make things interesting, I’ve blanked out the Y-axis scale. But just so that we’re not too mean, here are a few clues:

1. If you’ve heard of one of these sites, you’ve almost certainly heard of all five. Household “Web 2.0″ names.
2. Sites one and two are among the top 20 sites on the web.
3. It’s all relative.

Squidoo is just coming up on six months of being in the wild - first as part of a wide private beta, then as a public property opening its doors in December 2005. Squidoo gives individuals the power to publish ‘lenses’ on topics they’re passionate about using fast and easy publishing shortcuts. From Sudoku to Blackberry, the site has a huge range of members contributing lens content in the form of news, RSS feeds, Amazon listings, etc. Monitization from Google ads and Amazon Associate kickbacks are split by Squidoo and lensmasters, with options to offer proceeds to charities. Seth Godin is one of the founders (Chief Squid?) and has given Squidoo a monster shot of buzz.

After a big hop on launch day, Squidoo is now in the top ~5000 sites on the web with a reach of around 200-300 - solid traffic. But this graph is not the kind of up-and-to-the-right ramp that young web companies strive for. Three features of this graph catch my eye:

First, 2006 is flat.

Second, the spike-lull during beta looks a lot like the spike-lull after launch.

Third, holidays dampen momentum. I think Squidoo took a risk launching in December - unless you’re Amazon, the second half of the month is a black hole.

So what’s Squidoo to do? I’ll bet prognosticators will soon start blogging that a big strategy shift is in order, that Squidoo needs to see a big hockey stick growth graph or perish. Maybe turn Squidoo into a full blown wiki, add podcasting tools, or start giving away XBox 360s in exchange for giveaway-of-the-month traffic. Surely they’d do better if there was a Squidoo-branded AJAX home page?

The fact is that even with Seth Godin’s internet marketing oomph, growing a brand new service is hard. Worse still for all of the Web 2.0 dreamers out there, growth comes from unflagging attention to detail and ruthless execution. The chances of starting a novel site and achieving YouTubian growth are worse than the lottery.

So for my prediction: Squidooers are hard at work on the incremental improvements that can only be discovered from daily operation of the site and piles of user feedback. We’ll start to see changes before summer, and they won’t be radical departures from the site’s original purpose. Certainly more powerful tools for lensmasters, probably better methods for lensmasters and interested third parties to carry a more potent viral message, and search engine optimizations to build all-important pagerank and pull new members to the site. Since Squidoo focuses attention to drive an economic engine, maybe we’ll see affiliate-style reward system or other incentives outside the scope of a single lensmaster.

Squidoo has a lot of dials to turn, and I’m betting that small changes will yield big results. Time will tell, followed closely by Alexa graphs.

Update TechCrunch on the ‘Purple Albatross’: http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/05/09/squidoo-seth-godins-purple-albatross/

Update 2 Seth Godin Responds: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2006/05/overnight_succe.html