Mission Accomplished

Well, my blog went stale again. I apologize to the 100 people or so out there that read it. It's funny how my mindset becomes full-speed ahead for a project or idea, and I forget to stop and think about what might happen if things go well. Well, things certainly went well with the launch of twendz.

According to Compete, we increased traffic to our domain by 469% for the month of March. I'd imagine twendz had something to do with that.

In case you were wondering, the launch of twendz was quite a success. Frighteningly so. I was asked by our Marketing Manager for some figures to baseline against, basically metrics for us to set a goal to beat. I used Happytweets as a measuring stick, as I felt like that did pretty well in terms of how well it spread virally. I figured if we could beat the growth Happytweets has had, I would be pretty satisfied. What a joke.

Hold On Tight

You've heard of the Slashdot effect, right? The idea behind the saying is that if Slashdot picks you up on your homepage, your server is basically doomed based on the amount of traffic you receive. Another common analogy is when Fark.com picks up a story, you get "farked." As in, your web server is "farked." My buddy almost got kicked out of college because he had content on school servers that got farked.

Well, we didn't get the Slashdot effect, and we didn't get farked. We got CNETted. CNET gets just slightly more traffic than Slashdot and Fark. Here is a good visual representation of how these sites stack up together in terms of traffic. Last month, they were one of the top 100 websites in the world in terms of the amount of traffic they receive. Let's just say that after the CNET story broke on their homepage, we had to act very quickly to make sure we didn't get "farked" times 10.

We survived the traffic spree, and this spawned hundreds of other stories about my little pet project that started with a weekend stuck at home in a snowstorm. That next week, I flew to Vegas for the Microsoft's MIX09 Conference where they showed my demo video of twendz for their Showoff competition (see below).

Things have been incredibly busy and exciting since launch, not only since so many people are talking about Waggener Edstrom now (we were even on the local Portland news!), but since then there have been many opportunities to continue to grow the sentiment analysis technology, and package it in a way that is going to give our clients a competitive advantage in how they measure their brand.

Okay, So Now What?

I've received a ton of feedback about twendz. Most of it has been very positive, but there have been some opportunities to improve on what we've done (translation: I'm not perfect). I'm still dreaming up some crazy ideas and working on them in some ungodly hours of my days and weekends (with Jolt cola), but this time I'm listening more. I'm trying to read between the lines of what the users want, and what kinds of things people in my organization are saying. This is leading to taking more risks, and trying things that I'm not completely certain are going to be successful, so that's all I can really say for now. Hopefully I'll be able to continue to be innovative as well as have fun creating cool new things. I owe it to myself and my peers to keep trying.