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# finish including indexed search by integrating it into the browser-extension scripts
# change user reputation algorithm to seperate spam profiles, also balance and improve rating of URLs for better search results

2 days of hard coding have past and along with several bugs we reached some major improvement in indexed search and reputation ranking of both: users and websites.

By now, you should be able to find better content more quickly!

looking back

Running a web 2.0 website is not like eating candy - it’s more like cleaning up the candy store. When we started, everything had to be perfect - we hacked a lot of features into the application - speaking of audio-recording flash-servers, blogging-web-OS-applications and even tried to reach the 60% non early adopters (i.e. non tech geeks i.e. IE users ) with our IE-C#-Explorer-Application-Integration-Sidebar :/ …..

Besides the fact that all this stuff burned a lot of time and money, we created a code-monster which could hardly be maintained or improved. Also we quickly learned, that people get confused with all that fuzzy geeky stuff …. they didn’t want an application to solve all their web-related problems but just to satisfy a main urge - like how to store their bookmarks efficiently. So we are now at the point of deleting a lot of things and concerning about core functions and usability. We now try to “hit it hard” and do at least some things right:

To be honest, folkd.com never was a very good service yet. I never felt satisfied of what we had produced. Everything is a littlebit of a mess regarding code as also as the user-generated-content - plus it was (and is still sometimes) very sloooowww. After going public, we hoped it would hit critical mass in an instant - surfing on the wave of the bubble-exitement - as a matter of fact we never made it to techcrunch yet, because mike once wasn’t able to get his chosen password to pass our (at that time very restrictive) guidelines

gamma release

As nobody of us dedicated his whole life to the project it quickly was treated as an orphan. Updates and bugfixes became rare and as the amount of data grew, the ugly parts of our code became more and more critical to influence the projects performance. In february of 2007 we once again pulled ourselves together and pumped out the gamma release, which tackled several issues.

Again not much feedback occurred and new / more “interesting” projects began to consume more and more of our time. As we discussed about the future of the project during the last month, we realized an improvement in users’ stickyness to the folkd.com website and application. It seemed like some of the secondary changes had an impact on how users respond to the service. So the first step was to increase server performance to maintain this development. As we went from our own mysql-based search engine script to an indexed search server solution lately - it helped a lot to increase speed - as search is one of the main factors consuming performance.

current thoughts

Developing folkd.com we’ve got a lot of competition from all over the world. This thoughts can be very frightening - especially considering that 90% of the other teams have more skill, funding and time to spend on their apps. So in our last meeting we decided to follow the “eat your own dog food” approach. We will keep track of anything that annoys us and fix these issues step by step over the next weeks and month.

However there are several really cool functions i really enjoy about folkd.com:

• Remembering any website with a single click on the star- / folk it- button much like in GMail
• Recommending any website to any friend simply by selecting his name from the friends-dropdown box
• Seeing my friends being online in the second they open firefox and handle instant messanging with chat logs consistently through multible PC’s (and MAC’s )
• And of course: keep, share and discover some very good webpages

Our vision

When i think of folkd.com within a few years i’m very excited! I’m positive that even at slow growth the project can develop into a cool and shiny application, which really helps organize the users’ web-surfing experience. Here is some magic to think about - everything is already implemented but needs further development and the buzz of lots of people using it to work properly:

• Having millions of browser extensions installed, those “agents” provide us with the information where web-traffic currently is directed - Think of Alexa.com being real-time and taking a pages Hits/Visits into account while calculating its current reputation
  – already working, just needs more agents to produce useful data
• Think of folkd.com as a combination of digg.com and del.icio.us - you can vote favourite items provided by the community and your friends but also vote for any website your are currently visiting - using our browser extension. Also regarding the del.icio.us part - anybody is able to insert it’s own title, description and tags to any item - not only the first one to discover it.
  – we need to get better in usability but basically this already works
• Speaking of Google [the giant competitor everybody is trying to beat ] - i think we’ve quite an approach here. folkd.com discoveres the web along with its users. There’s a lot of time critical deep web action about pages which do get much traffic but not many external links in the short run - so the long tail of search will make the difference
  – still need more server power to take on this game…

what’s next

so as said before we are going to take down some features and increase usability of the folkd.com service - the following check-list shall give you an overview about what we have planned to do first:

1. focus on the website, making all sidebar functions easily availible through the web-login
2. finish including indexed search by integrating it into the browser-extension scripts
3. change user reputation algorithm to seperate spam profiles, also balance and improve rating of URLs for better search results
4. web-spider sumitted web-pages to combine/compare the contents with users’ descriptions and tags
5. rewriting the whole community-section, adding friends, creating/joining groups, search for people
6. include “Pictures” as a fifth doctype
7. get rid of all spam and spammers
8. complete translation to spanish and frensh

So if you are willing to help in any way or just let me know your ideas or thought on folkd.com - send me an e-mail to bk{äd}folkd{döt}com

Within the last days we made a few major performance updates and released a new version of the firefox sidebar extension of folkd.com - This was really necessary regarding the fact that these days there are over 2000 people online simultanously. One side effect of these changes is that search results are limited to a maximum of 2000 items. We hope you appreciate the changes.

on July 23rd of 2006 www.folkd.com was launched as a new social webservice with a revolutionary browser extension. A lot has happened since then - we worked very hard to “enrich your websurfing experience”. Thanks to all our fans, supporters, friends and co-developers for their great job in contributing to the product!

A glance into future…

I fixed several small bugs during the last days. Also i`m going to refacture the community-features - creating and using groups is buggy and not very intuitive. Additionally there is is the need for some new webservers - the service is currently very slow.

For the next few month our main goal is to reach 10K+ Users - so please spread the word!

Bastian

We took all your feature requests and released a brand new version of the folkd browser sidebar today. Firefox users will get an update to version 0.6gamma by Mozilla AddOns, IE users should empty their browser cache and the update will be active automatically.

The main features are:

- a new content tab which handles all your own bookmarks
- new reputation pulldown below the “save it button”

we also

- fixed a bug within session handling
- cleaned up a lot of code
- and sped up the system start a lot

We hope you enjoy the update and continue to post and mail more magnificent feedback.

– Bastian

It has been a while since my last post - but we worked a lot behind the scenes - so if you are a frequent user of folkd you maybe have noticed some updates.

We recently included our FAQ section and are going to post manuals on almost all processes you could handle with folkd.

Until then, if you’ve got some ideas or need help on anything, just send a short notice.

As i mentioned in my previous post, the mozilla AddOn Database is currently under Development, so that we could not update our Firefox extension. As also there was a bug, which caused the extension to downgrade itself after connection to Mozilla Update service - because the current version was not present on their servers.

By the help of the great staff of Mozilla we could solve both problems and the current AddOn Version 0.50gamma is now present and should be able to update automatically via your embedded Update Service!

Really BIG THANX to Fred, Mike, Robert, Dave and the rest of their crew! Also to jdp on mozilla IRC, who discovered the obvious problem: version 0.5 < 0.46 ! (because 5 < 46, and the dot is a seperator and does not indicate a decimal values)

Anybody out there - switch to Firefox!

Several users complained about the fact, that it is a bit difficult to find content on a certain topic. Often you have to search with multible keywords and still do not get the cool stuff you were looking for. So we created the “folkd Channels” to collect and share the best items on hot topics.

All channels are managed by a channel-master, who picks the best and most interesting keywords and submissions concerning his topic. This should help new users to easily find a lot of hot content at one single spot.

First we start with the “free music”-channel, that is featuring artists and bands who are offering their music for download free of charge.

Second, is a channel about the German “Mittelstand” ( medium-sized businesses ), which we set up to take part in a competition called “Innovationspreis 2007” at the German trade fair CeBIT in Hannover. It’s dedicated to help German entrepreneurs and start-ups in finding interesting articles about finance, law and economy.

Everybody out there is invited to suggest new channels and become a channel-master himself.