famfam

Are they hits to the front page? Direct would suggest something like a Twitter client or email. But I don't see much mention of your url on Twitter. Perhaps it's been shortened. Really annoying that there's probably no way to figure out what's going on in that case. What's the network distribution of your visitors? Does it look legit?

High unlikely your app is going "viral". It's probably on the front page of something big. Uhh, can't you look at the referrer logs to find out where?

Who here thinks that Zuck has always known about this contract? And has been praying every day that Ceglia had forgotten about it / died / etc. And the stress and stakes rose day after day, Zuck dying on the inside like w/ the tell-tale heart, stress coming through the cracks at his AllThingsD meltdown, etc...?

Amazon reaching out is the opportunity. Not the droid/berry/nokia you have sitting on your desk that will be sitting there next month.

What's going to happen is that they will disappear in the middle of the night some day, probably whenever some cop they've paid off let's them know they're about to get raided.

Maybe you're on Substance D?

It's definitely killing Wikipedia in the area of random text generation. Reading Cpedia is like dropping acid and having William S. Burroughs read you search results.

I'd upvote you twice if I could for pointing out this amazing resource. I'm amazed I never knew about it.

Interesting ideas. I think I agree with trafficlight's reply. Without domain knowledge, it's hard to tell whether these are real pain points or not. Like - which of these are actually costing people money right now? Which of them need the human touch (e.g. plumbing scheduling, carpet cleaning sales)?

And then selling to these small businesses - how do you scale it? I almost think there's a meta problem here, of small business outreach. How can you connect people to tools that might improve their businesses - where are they even looking for tools to improve their business?

How would you monetize this hypothetical FeedBurner challenger?

The irony of Peter Cooper advocating the Peter Principle is not lost on me.

Please explain this site... I don't get it! Especially the part about how it gets traffic! :)

Even if you assume all the traffic comes in during just an 8 hour window of a 24 hour day, that's still barely over 1TPS. It's nothing. You didn't say how big your dataset was in mysql. If you were at 100x data to RAM ratio I would definitely be worried, or if you had any especially slow queries. I think even if you were at 10x data to RAM ratio you would be okay mysql-wise, assuming you're getting something close to 10ms latency on your disks. (Which you ought to be able to with Linode/Slicehost/EC2). If your app for whatever reason has burstiness (e.g. sharing/viral events) then you need to plan around whatever peak load you're willing to support.

BTW, my personal opinion is that Joyent is grossly grossly overpriced. And are they still forcing you to run Solaris?

Roll Through the Ages - Yahtzee meets Civilization. My wife AND parents both like it.