That’s a lot of files! If you’ve ever noticed the excessive flickering happening in your browser’s status bar when you go to Facebook, this is the cause.

How can they improve the situation? The total file size isn’t too terrible at about 100k of JS and 40k of CSS. The best thing to do would be to use a simple build script that concatenates all these files together into one larger file. If they can’t do that for some reason, they could at least serve the files from more than one domain to take advantage of parallel downloads in the browser. They could also try a service like Akamai, but that’s a bit more complex and expensive.

This seems like a really silly oversight from an organization that in general produces beautiful work. My guess is that when the company was getting started they set up a relatively simple build process that has now become ingrained and difficult to alter as their setup has quickly become larger and more distributed. However, they’ve reached the point where it’s time to revisit things and do it properly.

In February, I made the tough decision to leave the incredible Yahoo! Answers team and dive full time into a venture of my own. That venture is a new site called Feed Each Other (feedeachother.com). Today, the invite only beta period is over and the site has been opened up to the public. (That means you should check it out and spread the word!)

What is Feed Each Other? Well, it’s your new feed reader :)

If you don’t know what a feed reader is, you can read up on the idea here. In short, it’s a tool that lets you read the latest headlines and content from many different websites quickly in one place instead of visiting each site individually.

Those of you who are already familiar with the concept are wondering what Feed Each Other adds to the equation. The answer is that in addition to being a world class reader, Feed Each Other lets you harness the power of your network of friends and colleagues to help you filter and explore the web in an fun, enlightening, efficient way.

Wouldn’t it be nice to know which feeds your friends subscribe to? Shouldn’t you be able to find new feeds by topic? Wouldn’t it be cool if you could browse feeds related to your subscriptions? Shouldn’t you be able to share things that you find in your reader without clogging up your friend’s email? How great would it be if your reader could automatically point you towards other interesting, like-minded people?

Feed Each Other makes all of those things a reality (and more!). You know what your friends like, and they know what you like. Feed Each Other lets you help each other, and the community at large, find new things and stay informed. I see it as a logical progression in the way that we go about exploring the web and consuming information online. It simply makes sense, and this is why I felt compelled to leave my job and go and build it.

It’s been a crazy 7 months, but I’ve already learned a lot and hopefully the journey is just beginning. I got some great help from my partner in this new venture, the brilliant Dan McKinley, and I’d also like to thank all my family and friends that have been incredibly supportive and helpful. Thanks for all the feedback, encouragement and enthusiasm!

Lastly, I just want to mention that the end of the private beta means that the major functionality is in place and is stable. That definitely does not mean that the site is finished. Expect to see many new features, fixes and adjustments in the weeks and months to come. Hopefully all of that will happen with the help of some great feedback from the people like you, the reader of this post.

So, what are you waiting for? Go and play with it. Tell your friends!

Related Links:

• A more detailed introduction to Feed Each Other and what it offers.
• A special shout out goes to our new Manager of Creative Engagement, Sierra Chappell, for all of her help and her wonderful spirit.
• More acknowledgments and thanks.
• From now on, Feed Each Other specific announcements will be at the Feed Each Other Blog.

Scripted links and non-scripted links lead to drastically different user experiences. We should make them look different too.

Clicking a non-scripted link causes the browser to fetch, parse and render an entire new page. The url changes. The screen flickers. The scroll bar shoots back up to the top. It’s kind of a big deal.

A scripted link, most of the time, has less severe consequences for the user. Maybe a tab gets swapped in, or a floating div pops up to display some information. Whatever it is, it’s a very different experience than a non-scripted link. The page doesn’t reload. The scroll bar stays right where it is. You won’t lose any text you may have entered into a text box.

We should let our users know what sort of experience they’re getting themselves into before they click. We should help them make the decision of whether or not a link is click-worthy.

Many great sites use both regular and scripted links together but do not consistently differentiate between the two types. Sites like Facebook, Flickr, Google Video, Yahoo’s Homepage, Digg, Youtube, and many more. Nearly every site out there gets this wrong.

Here are a few screenshots from popular sites with this issue.

On Google Video, the “Comments” or “Collapse Frame” links are safe for me to click on while watching a video. The “Help” link is not. As a user, I don’t have a great way of making the distinction. One wrong click on that help link and I’ll forever be afraid to click on any links until my video has finished playing for fear that I’ll lose my place.

This is from the featured content module on the Yahoo! Homepage. The top two links send me to a totally different page. The bottom link just loads different content dynamically in the module. The links look identical.

Youtube has different styles applied to their links, but unfortunately it’s not consistent. It would be great if all of the scripted links had the dotted underline for example. Then I’d know for sure that clicking on a page number is safe, but clicking a person’s name will interrupt my video and I should be careful.

– ———

As web developers, we probably don’t have as much trouble with this as most people. We have a good feel for which types of functionality tend to get implemented dynamically and which ones don’t. We know what cues to look for. But, for less savvy users, a consistent style differentiation could go a long way to making them more comfortable to click on scripted links. And users that feel comfortable clicking will explore and in turn find your site easier to use.

There are a few ways to go about implementing this (and we’ll have to do it without any built in help from the browser this time). The approach I’ve taken on my newest project is to simply slap a class=”scripted” on all of my scripted links as I’m building my pages and I’ve made links of that class look slightly different. If you’ve already got a large site and doing that manually would be too painful, then you may be able to apply the style to these links at run time via javascript as long as you’ve been consistent in the manner in which you’ve executed your scripted links. You could look for links that have a defined onClick event, or an empty href, something like that.

a:link { }
a:visited { }

By default, visited links are purple. This is a concept that we’re all very familiar with, both as web developers and web users. It’s simple, it’s useful and it’s only really possible because the browser itself is doing the link tracking for us.

Imagine if web developers were tasked with manually applying such a style to each and every link? We’d have to implement some sort of system to track which links our users are clicking on and then programmatically apply a style like <a class=”visited”>s</a> to each link. Would anyone go through the trouble? Nope. We’d be missing out on lots of useful information because it would be nearly impossible to implement.

Thankfully, we don’t have that problem with visited links, but we do have a problem with another type of link. The external type.

An external link is a link that goes to a different domain than the one that the current page resides at. A link can either be internal or external. It would be trivially easy for a browser to apply a pseudo style called a:external for us on the appropriate links. Wouldn’t that be nice to have? Definitely.

Implementing this manually is certainly easier to do than with the visited case. Sites like Wikipedia have been doing it for a long time. You could do it with a little bit of js, or by adding a class=”external” to all the right links. But, it’s still an extra step that only the most conscientious web developers will bother to take. If it were built into the browser and given a subtle default style, then we’d all benefit from it despite the lack of effort or knowledge from the large majority of web developers.

How can we go about making this happen? Who makes all these CSS spec decisions? Can I edit the Firefox source myself and submit a patch?

As I work in my living room day after day, I find the analogy between writing a website and writing a novel jumping out at me. I’m constantly tinkering with things until they feel just right. Writing and re-writing. Asking friends and family for feedback. Tweaking. Starting over. Trying to keep an eye on the big picture. Fighting to make sure that all the little details are just right.

Like an enticing first paragraph in a novel, a website needs to hook you. Like the scenery of a novel, a website needs a consistent look and feel. And, just as the characters in a novel interact with one another, a website in today’s world needs to allow for interesting, useful interactions between its users.

It is in the definition of the allowable interactions that I find myself devoting the most time and energy. How can my users connect with one another? How can they share and improve one another’s experience?

A great book gets better as you read on. Its characters gain depth. It teaches you something. A great social website gets more useful the more you and others use it. You learn the ins and outs. You get to know the familiar characters. They help you and you help them.

In order for all that to happen, the site needs to have the right foundation. The right set of available interactions. The right blend of rules and flexibility.

In a good novel, the characters do things that make sense in the world within which they have been set. When they act otherwise, it feels wrong and out of place.

Imagine a book where the characters had free will and were only bound by the world they were placed in. If that world wasn’t described in quite the right way, those characters might behave badly. Worst of all, they might become boring and uninterested in one another. They might all sit in their apartments and watch tv by themselves. That would make for a pretty awful book. We, as readers, want our characters to talk to each other, to love one another, to get in fights, to teach each other. We want them to care.

I want my site to have users like that. Users that care. To make that happen, I need to provide those users with the right environment. I need to create the right incentives and benefits for interaction.

The success of a social website does not depend on technical ability or on the size and impressiveness of a feature set. It depends on the landscape of interaction. Get that right and you’re on your way. Get it wrong and you’re in the deadpool.

It’s not easy. I’m nervous.

Notes:

#1 – It might sound like I’m talking about making a site that’s full of rules about who you can talk to and when and how. That’s not it. It’s about giving people the right channels to connect. Like letting users create groups on Flickr, or letting them write on the wall on Facebook. Stuff like that. Which ones are most beneficial? Which ones lead to negative behavior? Which ones do you draw attention to? Which ones can remain hidden secrets for the initiated?
#2 – Luckily, unlike with a novel, I don’t have to get it all right on day one. My site can evolve along with the ever-changing community.
#3 – Wouldn’t it be cool if you could write to the author of your favorite novel and ask them to change something? And then they did. Actually, someone should make a site where authors can do this and publish different versions of the same story, influenced by the requests of readers. That would be cool.

Invariably, the top few results for queries like this contain links to pages at http://www.w3schools.com. These pages are marginally informative, but they’re mostly a waste of time. Somehow they’ve gained an extremely high page rank, so they’re always near the top, but their content stinks.

To take them out of my life, and yours, I’ve written a simple greasemonkey script that strips anything from w3schools.com from Google search results. If anyone wants a version for Yahoo! Search, let me know.

If you decide to use it, please let me know with a comment here. I’d love to know if anyone out there shares my pain. Thanks.

Get the script here

I used to glance at the http://isitnormal.com statistics rather obsessively. Recently, with my focus shifting to my new venture, I’ve found it slipping my mind more and more. I just took a look at the Google Analytics page for the first time in a week or so and decided to go back in time a bit and see if I could notice anything interesting.

It seems that a positive trend is indeed emerging. The slope of the page view graph in the last few months is more than double that of the graph in the previous year. Now this isn’t really dramatic. The site is still growing slowly, but steadily. However, the increase in the growth rate is substantial. The question is what led to this jump?

Since the beginning of the year, I have gradually shifted all of my attention to my new project. I’ve completely neglected Is It Normal. I haven’t been moderating it like I typically do. I usually delete stories that I think are completely repulsive or idiotic. I ban users that do nothing but berate other people. I chat with the members and see if they have any concerns or ideas for new features. Lately, I’ve been doing none of these things and it’s the only difference I can think of that would have an effect like this. I’ve been letting the users manage things on their own and that has actually led to better site growth.

In my absense, there has been a steady increase in flagging activity throughout the site. They’ve noticed that I’m not around and the good samaritans on the site have taken up the responsibility themselves. In some way, they’re doing a better job at it than I ever did. I’m finally coming to grips with the fact that the community knows what it wants better than I do. What I think is interesting doesn’t necessarily match up with what they think is interesting. Once I had given them some tools with which they could manage the site, all I needed to do was get out of their way. My old boss Ofer summed it up nicely when I mentioned the appearance of this trend to him. He said, “show’s what you know.”

It’s a really beautiful thing in a way, but it’s a tough leap of faith to take. The temptation to tinker is always there and it’s really hard to step back. I guess it’s sort of like raising a child. You need to provide for a comfortable environment and set some ground rules, but after that, you need to relinquish some control. They key is to pick the right rules and to provide the right self-management tools.

I just wish my users wouldn’t be so intent on talking about the bizarre, vulgar and sexual so that I could make a little more money from all these page views. I’ve raised a potty-mouth. Why can’t they talk about iPods, cars and mortgages?? Oh well… Anyone out there have some good monetization strategies for a site like this?

Some guy named Gary Price has written a nice review here: [The birth of Yahoo! Answers](http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/051207-220118). He calls it a “social networking/online community/search/question answering service “. I think that about sums it up.

Yahoo! Site Explorer Beta

Some stats for isitnormal.com

• 1,020 Pages Indexed (This seems a little too low)
• 296 In-links

Some stats for breasy.com

• 20 Pages Indexed
• 43 In-links

In response to a question about the future of the semantic web and ideas like tagging, Brin said the following:

I think that tagging and semantics are great, as long as the computers are doing the tagging and semantics. Because, if people are doing the tagging and semantics for the computers, there is something a little bit inverted about the relationship between man and machine there.

This is a very telling statement and, assuming Brin speaks for the direction Google is headed in the future, it makes the distinction between Google and what some believe to be its closest online competitor, Yahoo!, very clear.

Yahoo! recently acquired Flickr, the shining example of tagging when applied to the world of photography. It has built and continues to expand on MyWeb, a system for tagging the web ala del.icio.us. It’s also got LaunchCast online radio, a service that uses user rankings of songs, albums and artists to recommend music in a collaborative, networked way.

Now Google. They’ve got a fantastic search engine. A search engine that takes the tags that already exists out there (links created by people) and aggregate and analyze them. They also have maps, news and gmail. Great interfaces, highly usable and effective, but nothing really new in the way of gathering and organizing information. I always imagined Google would venture down the same path Yahoo! looks to be taking. It seems from Sergey’s comment that this may not be so.

Yahoo! is working on tools that empower and encourage their large user base to organize all that stuff out there. They’re banking on their ability to help you help yourself. Google, well they’re banking on all their Phd’s and their ability to teach the computers how to help you directly.

There’s a clear difference in approach here and I think it will be really interesting to see which one is more successful in the next few years. It seems that the two companies are really set to diverge and perhaps they can even do so in a symbiotic manner.

I have a feeling that the online landscape is about to change, and I’m excited to be a part of it.

Update: It looks like someone at Business 2.0 read my blog post and wrote a story about the same topic ;) Pretty interesting.