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Twitter isn't the same as Myspace, AOL, Facebook, etc. Twitter doesn't have a revenue stream except their funding from the VCs. The other companies you name do or at least did at one time where Twitter is .com 2.0.

One factual error that you made is that you've implied that Facebook has peaked, they haven't peaked yet by any measure I've found, at least not yet, it is still growing.: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/facebook.com

Probably no web service will be popular for the long term, that's not a measure of anything because all things will come to an end, web services doubly so. I wouldn't doubt that Slashdot is down a lot from its peak as well, it's not a top 100 site anymore like I recall it was at one time, not even top 1000. The web changes so much so quickly that almost no one can predict what is going to be next.

People who do not want offensive content will just leave Google's default "moderate safe search" filter on.

I would also guess that the heavy internet users are not likely to be the most conservative people. Take a look at the Alexa list of the most popular sites in India. There are a good many porn sites in the top 100

If they are trying to avoid legal problems, it is a pretty poor attempt. You can still get sexually explicit content through more imaginative searches, and play the videos on the Bing site itself.

I wonder what your religious users will make of that?

> Is google.cn only censored when it detects IP addresses within China?

Yes. Do not use a Chinese proxy, even if you are curious. You could get someone killed or thrown in jail.

If you are really curious, try putting some banned keywords into some Chinese websites from your own internet connection.

Many Chinese web searches are accessible from $your_country.

TFA raises a valid point but overstates the case. ICANN's work is indeed politicized, and one need look no further than the disparate fates of the .sex and .info TLDs to see that. On the other hand, it's hard to believe that something run by the U.N. would be any better.

In reality, though, DNS has lost much of its original importance. This becomes clear when you consider that all but a handful of Alexa's top 20 sites have names that have no real connection to the business. They're just rarely used words that lack much meaning in everyday life (Google, Amazon) or entirely made up (wikipedia, ebay). There are already alternative public root servers, and while these lack popularity, it shows how easy it would be for a distributed naming system to gain a foothold.

The real outcome of handing the rootservers over to an international committee would be to hasten the day when there is no longer one unified DNS, a day we'll probably see before too long anyway.

Statistics. Also, scroll down and note the % of people who actually proceed to search.live.com, and then look at this. (note that the last two statistics probably overlap gratuitously, so if you want to do any math, ignore the third, because the second is more precise.) And if you want some laughs, put google and yahoo into the compare boxes.

Statistics. Also, scroll down and note the % of people who actually proceed to search.live.com, and then look at this. (note that the last two statistics probably overlap gratuitously, so if you want to do any math, ignore the third, because the second is more precise.) And if you want some laughs, put google and yahoo into the compare boxes.

Erm

no one uses this site

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/bookabooka.fi

this is a non story

I dont think so

The site gets no visitors...

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/bookabooka.fi

now gigapedia.com on the other hand....

I guess that's a good sign. Because if such a benighted group of anencephalic twits can run one of the net's busiest sites, the world must be doing damn well.

It's a pretty busy site (in the top 1000), but at #942, I don't know if I'd call it "one of the net's busiest sites".

http://alexa.com/siteinfo/slashdot.org

2600 sites larger than slashdot...

I dunno, the busy ones are all in the same ballpark, definitely the same magnitude, and twitter is a remarkably simple service compared to linkedin or hulu. As for "heavy lifting", a page view is a page view; pageviews do not suddenly get easier to service because that page has a video on it.

That said, none of them come near facebook.

Actually, Scribd is the closest, and had more traffic than twitter until the recent media frenzy.

Pointing out that the "heavy lifting" is done outside RoR isn't saying much. If you consider the heavy lifting of the entire Hulu service to be video encoding and streaming, well, obviously that's not done in Rails, that'd be stupid.

Personally, I would consider pushing that many web requests "heavy lifting" in the domain of problems for which Rails is a potential solution.

http://www.postgresql.org/

Just saying.

So let's restrict our domain a bit for a moment, say to websites. Google uses MySQL for some of their databases. Yahoo! uses MySQL for some of their databases. So do YouTube, Facebook, Wikipedia, and Baidu. That's six of the top ten websites. I couldn't quickly find info on blogger.com or MySpace (too many hits to blogs hosted there!), and presumably live.com and msn.com use MSSQL. That covers all of the Alexa top ten websites. In other words, every top ten website that I was able to find info on uses MySQL, unless it's Microsoft-owned (I didn't even bother checking those).

So tell me: if pgsql is so superior for all purposes, why aren't these places using it instead? Are any of the ten using it at all? What's the biggest website you can find that makes serious use of PostgreSQL? You can't claim that application compatibility or hosting availability are relevant to sites that write their own software and run their own server farms.

I've seen a lot of claims about how much better pgsql is, but somehow big websites aren't using it. Maybe it's more popular in non-web settings? I'm a web developer, so that's what I focus on.

Or maybe, just maybe, pgsql is actually worse than MySQL in some ways that a majority of the top websites have spotted. Just saying.

you can speed that up with -- http://www.alexa.com/site/help/webmasters#crawl_site -- recently, requests i've made have been honored within a day.

http://adultfriendfinder.com/

if you are familiar with it, it has tons of salacious user generated content. and it is an extremely well-visited site

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/adultfriendfinder.com

Adultfriendfinder.com has a traffic rank of: 79

no one is tracking their 2257 info. if the american taliban had such a weapon in their hands, wouldn't they be prosecuting this site into oblivion?

aff says so itself:

http://adultfriendfinder.com/go/page/2257_notice.html

Pursuant to 18 USC 2257, all persons who appear in any visual depiction of "sexually explicit conduct" as defined in 18 USC 2256 at Adult FriendFinder were over the age of 18 at the time of the creation of such depictions. Records required to be maintained by this section are kept by the custodian of records:

David Bloom
Custodian of Records
Various, Inc.
220 Humboldt Ct,
Sunnyvale, CA 94089

As provided by 18 USC 2257 (h) (2) (B) (iii), Adult FriendFinder's member information is not similarly maintained.

The date of production is 2/21/2009.

in other words, members of a dating site, which this ohio swingers site obviously is, are excluded, by law, from keeping track of these onerous records, since they are not selling photos, they are selling dating contacts. (aff mentions it has 2257 records, only because it does generate some adult content for the purposes of selling, separate form its dating area)

dating sites are excluded. user generated content is excluded. youtube, google, flickr, etc: excluded

so why is this even an issue?

Nah, I used to run one of the bigger, well know publically facing clusters. It was ranked #300 by Alexa when I left over 2 years ago. What's happened since is their own fault. :)

    Actually, this wouldn't have downed that network. Every GigE circuit was individual to a city, or set of racks (depending on the site). There were no cross connects between them. Almost everything was designed so if we lost a city for any reason, it didn't hurt the site. We had connectivity outages, and even a couple brownouts that upset the power systems, but the sites were always accessible.

    Slashdot should not, under any circumstances, be hosted in one location. In my opinion, they should be at the largest continental and intercontinental peerings that they can be at.

    1 Wilshire, Los Angeles, CA - providing the west coast of the US, and the most substantial fiber links on the Pacific.

    111 8th Ave, New York, NY - providing the east coast of the US, and virtually all of the links to Europe.

    36 NE 2nd St, Miami, FL - providing the southeast US, redundancy for the Southeast US, and some fiber to Europe and S. America

    Redundant options.

    426 S LaSalle St, Chigaco, IL - providing good service to the East and West coast of the US

    55 S Market St, San Jose, CA - providing good service to the West coast of the US, and some trans-Pacific connectivity

    Some people really like Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, Las Vegas, Salt Lake City, and Vienna/Ashburn/Reston. I don't really suggest it, if you can have a presence in the better locations.

    There are some very nice global options too. I'm not sure how well the European networks have cleaned up. Several years ago, due to peering arrangements over there, most European traffic ended up going to New York and back to Europe, even though we were on one of the top Tier 1 providers. We ditched the site, and sent all of Europe to New York. Our users sent complements on our "new data center in Europe", since it was so fast. :) People like to complain, but rarely send complements. That was interesting. There are some great locations in Australia and Asia also, but ... well ... it's all in how much you want to spend.

    I know people in the Silicon Valley always scream when I suggest them as secondary, but if you've had a good look at all the major cities, you'd get over yourselves. Just because you live there, and there are expensive neighbors, it doesn't make you the center of the world.

    Slashcode would need some revamping to make work in this environment. There are lots of options there too.

    But, I'm not on the Slashdot IT team, so I don't get to make these decisions (or even give opinions).

Its a large website, not anywhere near the largest.

Wikipedia is the 7th-largest website in the world according to Alexa. google.com only gets ten times the page views wikipedia.org does (again according to Alexa). It is most definitely "near the largest" website.

Hi! Your points are good ones. The bad behavior and bad user experiences definitely bother me, and I wish it were otherwise.

On the other hand, I'm cautious about comparing real things against imaginary standards rather than existing competitors. That's not to knock imaginary standards, as they help us push for a better world. But although they tell us what we'd like, they don't tell us what is possible.

It's my hope that ten years from now we'll have a number of other collaborative Internet projects at Wikipedia's scale that have eliminated many of the flaws of Wikipedia's model. But looking at traffic rankings, the only sites that strike me as closely comparable are IMDB and Flickr. Both are nakedly commercial, and totally controlled and run by full-time staff. IMDB is very hard to participate in effectively, and on Flickr, you have to pay to contribute much. Flickr also avoids a lot of Wikipedia's battling by letting people set up as much personal territory as they want, which is a better experience for contributors, but makes it a lot less useful for readers.

Another interesting comparison is Craiglist, which is just as open as Wikipedia, and is at least close to a non-profit. But again, what little control is strongly central. There, the central control is informed by the active participants, but it's still Craig's territory. And the only thing that makes it useful to readers is the search; a large swathe of the content is somewhere between "dubious" and "open sewer" in quality level.

Two other interesting comparisons are the social networks, the benefits and numerous flaws of which are obvious, and search engines. The Internet is already one giant collaborative project, and the search engines are the gateways to that, trying to extract some order from the soup. But it's not obvious to me that is of higher quality or less drama-filled than Wikipedia. As evidenced by the fact that Wikipedia is in the top three for an awful lot of searches, a lot of people find Wikipedia more useful than the rest of the content the search engines are indexing.

So in sum, I agree that Wikipedia isn't perfect, but for at least some ways of ranking, we don't have anything better yet.

Of course - you've invested a lot of your time in "levelling up" on Wikipedia, so anybody saying that Wikipedia has troubles *which don't affect "levelled up" people* is going to just feel fine. Common psychological mechanism. This is doubly true when we say that Wikipedia should change to remove your "levelled up" advantage. Which, overall, is the problem.

In this case, probably not so much. I do have a pretty old account, but I'm not a very active contributor, except in occasional bursts. To the extent that there's an inside and an outside, I'm mainly on the outside; I just don't have the time for it to be otherwise. But it's fascinating to watch.

There's strong opposition to ads in the Wikipedia community. More important, though, is that Wales' attempt to run a wiki-based business is a flop.

Wikia, which was Jimbo Wales' attempt to monetize the Wikipedia concept, didn't really go anywhere. Wikia ended up as a free hosting service for fancruft, with wikis for Star [Wars|Trek|Gate|Craft] and such. There's also a "human powered search engine" on Wikia. They wanted to take on Google. The end result was a site with 1/10 the traffic of "ask.com". Wikia's current reach is about 0.2%. Wikia's traffic is dropping; Alexa says they peaked in May 2008, and they're down to half that. Wikia had a layoff in October.

As an ad-supported service, Wikia's demographic is terrible. The user base lives in their parents basement. So they can't even get much ad revenue from the users they have. Wikia had a big chunk of venture capital when they started, but that's running out. They overexpanded, with offices in New York, San Francisco, and Poland. Wales wanted to get a private jet; by now, he probably has to fly coach.

So that's what an ad-supported wiki run by Wales looks like.

wince

Looks like the cause is Facebook. Alexa shows it as well. Alexa has facebook going from 4% of "daily reach" to 13%. Given that the site serves a similar sort of purpose as Slashdot, I think it's sucking readers away. Here's a comparison with the top sites that Google will allow you to compare facebook to (they don't list statistics for google.com or youtube.com).

Looks like the cause is Facebook. Alexa shows it as well. Alexa has facebook going from 4% of "daily reach" to 13%. Given that the site serves a similar sort of purpose as Slashdot, I think it's sucking readers away. Here's a comparison with the top sites that Google will allow you to compare facebook to (they don't list statistics for google.com or youtube.com).

Man, that is just sad. Even PC Hell which looks like it was designed in 1993 and filled with old crap like how to remove the Blaster worm and a guide to Win95 OSR2 totally kicked their ass. But considering that I have been surfing tech sites for Deity knows how many years and I had never ever heard of it makes it not so surprising. Maybe he should have advertised? Or gotten the site put on Freshnews or the Daily Rotation? But surely he didn't expect to just throw up a website, never advertise, and have it magically turn into Slashdot just because of who he is, did he?

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/technocrat.net

come on slashdot, slow news day?

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/slashdot.org

I don't think their plans are working that well...

Define "a handful of users" and then define "a handful of Slashdot users" and as a sibling points out: imagine a kind of hosting plan that would be nice for "a handful of users," where you could publish what you wanted for free or just for a couple of ads, which isn't backed up by any big business (because this isn't business presentation site). Wow, that kind of hosting would be nice for the end-user that would spend more money on transactions than the actual price of the hosting, because the end-user doesn't have 10,000 visitors/day except once every 5 years.

"pretty uncontested" != "completely uncontested"

Here it should be pretty obvious what's meant by "pretty". And I completely accept that it was not obvious to you. It is amazing how modifiers like that can change the meaning of simple/absolute statements.

Assuming everyone got their news from online press, and assuming that cnn.com and factcheck.org together were roughly proportional indicators (meaning that there was a factcheck.org equivalent for each of the other major online news sources) of uncontested vs. contested reporting, the numbers are still pretty supportive of my statement, at a persons-reached ratio of 150 to 1

"pretty uncontested" != "completely uncontested"

Here it should be pretty obvious what's meant by "pretty". And I completely accept that it was not obvious to you. It is amazing how modifiers like that can change the meaning of simple/absolute statements.

Assuming everyone got their news from online press, and assuming that cnn.com and factcheck.org together were roughly proportional indicators (meaning that there was a factcheck.org equivalent for each of the other major online news sources) of uncontested vs. contested reporting, the numbers are still pretty supportive of my statement, at a persons-reached ratio of 150 to 1

Dear slashdot editors,

slashdot.org is not stackoverflow.com.
The articles and discussions here are not searchable in a sane way. Your recent attempts to mimic stackoverflow are just a waste of everybody's time because all those little tidbits that people post get lost in the internet noise immediately.

We know you're bit desperate for traffic these days. But this is not the way to go.

This is actually much closer to the intended idea of Wikipedia - that it would be raw material for others to use. Rather than wikipedia.org itself being horribly, expensively popular as people access the live working rough draft and then complain that CVS HEAD contains bugs. Oh well. You get the userbase you get, not the userbase you first thought of.

The "we have no clue but slashvertisments pay"-kind.

Slashdot is declining but still attracts roughly 8 million page views per day.

The article has 10 pages, each carries 5 banners.
Let's assume they are paid a very conservative $.50 USD per one thousand unique visitors for each of these banners.
Let's further assume slashdot drove 2 million unique's to the article.
Let's further assume those people, on average, clicked through 3 pages before they realized there is nothing to see.

That's a solid $15000 USD, under fairly pessimisic assumptions. They probably made closer to $30000 by the time you are reading this.

Seriously, couldn't this space on /. be taken up by something that matters on the intarweb?

According to Alexa, Yahoo! is the most popular site on the internet. I'd say that that's more than enough to make a website matter, personally.

He never had much traffic on sourcetool.com. Even at its peak there's no way he was making $100K+ a month:
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/sourcetool.com

This guy is just trying to blame Google for a bad business plan.

I did a bit of research into OpenDNS a while ago, the link is here

I've been a little intrigued by what sort of real benefit the likes of OpenDNS might actually have on, so I thought I'd do a bit of a test of, and see what it does.

SO I thought I'd start with the worlds most popular websites, according to http://www.alexa.com/ I got a list of the top 100 global websites.

the basic results turned out to be...
1. OpenDNS server at 208.67.222.222 average = 108.8787879 min = 15 max = 1273

2. my ISP's DNS server at ns0.zen.co.uk average = 16.9798 min = 13 max = 24

3. a local server running bind 9.2.4 server, having done a rndc flush (this will force a full DNS tree root name resolution - hence the very large times) average = 828.4747475 min = 43 max = 4983

4. the same server as 3, run without flushing the cache average = 1.424242424 min = 0 max = 93

which I think is pretty much what I expected! a local ISP's DNS servers will generally be faster than anything elsewhere because they take advantage of being well used and hence having full cache, and being local so traffic doesn't have to go very far.

a local server doing full root DNS resolutions will take the longest to resolve simply because there is a DNS tree that it needs to propagate through.

according to alexa (ok, not the most reliable source) about 60% of the traffic is US.

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/slashdot.org

Well, I suppose if Microsoft follows the no-competition ideal, then I suppose "not being on the top" is a failure. That's based only on opinion though.

Comparison of google.com, yahoo.com, live.com and msn.com: http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/google.com?site0=google.com&site1=yahoo.com&site2=live.com&site3=msn.com&y=r&z=3&h=300&w=610&c=1&u%5B%5D=google.com&u%5B%5D=yahoo.com&u%5B%5D=live.com&u%5B%5D=msn.com&x=2008-07-13T18%3A35%3A29.000Z&check=www.alexa.com&signature=7VFjfS3SF3e6AwQvnDgu53bfAmk%3D&range=max&size=Medium

How do "major web site" (as in "in any way important or at least interesting") and "Twitter" belong in the same sentence?

They are at position 933 on Alexa's list of the world's most visited websites. I'd guess that means circa 1.5m registered users, 2.5m visitors/month, and 7.5m page views/day. As a comparison, they have about 2-3x the reach of Slashdot.

They may seem less well known to you than that because it's a social networking app that has spread mostly by word of mouth. If your friends use it, you won't be able to escape it; otherwise, it will seem irrelevant.

How do "major web site" (as in "in any way important or at least interesting") and "Twitter" belong in the same sentence?

They are at position 933 on Alexa's list of the world's most visited websites. I'd guess that means circa 1.5m registered users, 2.5m visitors/month, and 7.5m page views/day. As a comparison, they have about 2-3x the reach of Slashdot.

They may seem less well known to you than that because it's a social networking app that has spread mostly by word of mouth. If your friends use it, you won't be able to escape it; otherwise, it will seem irrelevant.

It's probably more illuminating to look at those separately:

• Slashdot reach: ~0.03% per day
• Wikipedia reach: ~10% per day

Wikipedia gets 300 times the traffic that Slashdot does, according to Alexa. And that doesn't even count the sister projects. wikimedia.org gets 0.6% reach, 20 times Slashdot. Slashdot isn't even up to some of the small projects like Wiktionary and Wikibooks. To quote the Wikimedia Bugzilla's quips list,

Xirzon: are the servers up for slashdotting ? brion: we get more traffic than /. usually we don't even notice the bump on the traffic graphs

It's probably more illuminating to look at those separately:

• Slashdot reach: ~0.03% per day
• Wikipedia reach: ~10% per day

Wikipedia gets 300 times the traffic that Slashdot does, according to Alexa. And that doesn't even count the sister projects. wikimedia.org gets 0.6% reach, 20 times Slashdot. Slashdot isn't even up to some of the small projects like Wiktionary and Wikibooks. To quote the Wikimedia Bugzilla's quips list,

Xirzon: are the servers up for slashdotting ? brion: we get more traffic than /. usually we don't even notice the bump on the traffic graphs

Correct

Technically, /. is doing the exact same thing, the differnce? /. would fucking bury the AP if they tried that shit here ...

My ONLY news site is /.

What I find really interesting is how slashdot, with it's eponymously named server-killing effect, compares to a thrice weekly web comic about stick figures being geeky.

-Ted

Let's take a look at what Alexa has to say, shall we?

Traffic Rank for Amazon.com: 26
Traffic Rank for Slashdot.org: 3697

You were saying?

And for good measure ...

And just to piss off a Taco

Alexa ranking comparing slashdot.org and amazon.com (thats not including all the other amazon tlds!)

Netcraft doesn't track site popularity AFAIK, but Alexa does. And alexa does in fact confirm: slashdot is dying.

I mean, what the fuck guys? This is such an awesome website. I know that stupid videos get a lot of click throughs in the short term, but you're driving away your regulars with that silly shit. News, fellas, post news.

Netcraft doesn't track site popularity AFAIK, but Alexa does. And alexa does in fact confirm: slashdot is dying.

I mean, what the fuck guys? This is such an awesome website. I know that stupid videos get a lot of click throughs in the short term, but you're driving away your regulars with that silly shit. News, fellas, post news.

Netcraft doesn't track site popularity AFAIK, but Alexa does. And alexa does in fact confirm: slashdot is dying.

I mean, what the fuck guys? This is such an awesome website. I know that stupid videos get a lot of click throughs in the short term, but you're driving away your regulars with that silly shit. News, fellas, post news.