Others Online Blog

Just Increased Approved Keywords 143%

Serendipity: unexpected and fortunate discoveries.

Our users are now 143% more likely to connect serendipitously across the Web, because we just increased our approved keyword count by 143%.

For obvious reasons, we don't just connect people around any ole' keyword or phrase -- we can't connect people around the topic Christmas or Harry Potter for instance until those been approved. The keywords and phrases have been organically harvested and approved, by users themselves and also through our proprietary "scrubbing" process. Every day our approved keyword/phrase count increases. But Neal just increased it quite a bit.

We've long since had the standard interest keywords in there ("music, hiking, photography, etc."). We're primarily focusing now on adding (and connecting people now) around much more narrow keywords, such as "virgin coconut oil, xm satellite radio, pierre cardin, blue man group, pet health insurance, etc.".

Last month we doubled the size of our keyword count and it increased the depth of people matches 25%. This should provide even better results! Please let us know what you think ...

We've Got Issues ....

Starting around 12:30pm PST this afternoon, toolbar users and widget viewers have been experiencing poor or non-existent service. We're experiencing some performance issues with our database server, which is causing intermittent problems with the user experience. Mike and Neal have been digging in and we think a resolution is close at hand. We apologize for the inconvenience!!

Due to the substantial increase in users over the last week, we've been pushing our system more than it's ever been pushed ... so naturally we're seeing some performance bottlenecks. Please bear with us as we iron these things out?

Not Able to Sign Into the Toolbar?

Hey everyone, just found a bug. If you're not able to sign into the Others Online toolbar, it's because you have the "Show adult tab" option checked in User Options. For some reason, that seems to be breaking the sign-in process on both Firefox and IE.

The quick fix, until Mike can deploy the real fix, is to uncheck that option. But if you're not signed in already, you won't be able to save changes to User Options! So send us your username (support AT othersonline DOT com) and we'll fix it manually, as I've just done with two different users.

Sorry about the troubles! We'll get this taken care of straight away.

Welcome New Firefox Toolbar Users!

Mozilla was nice enough to add the Others Online toolbar to their add-ons page yesterday and since then we've had a ton of new users. Please show them some love, everyone!

Welcome to all of you new users, and if there's anything we can do to improve your experience please let us know!

Stats on Number of Others Online Targeted Introductions

Mike recently informed me that we're at almost 500K targeted "introductions" per week now. Our engagement rate on our widget is about 4%, and 40% of people who view a user profile go to that user's blog. Pretty cool, but IMHO not nearly good enough.

Seattle Startup Index and Others Online

Marcelo just published the latest Seattle Startup Index, which ranks Seattle startups by their Alexa and Compete ranks. We're happy to give some link love to the whole endeavor not only because Marcello is a cool local tech guy and an Others Online user, but moreso because my company Others Online is the 4th highest mover on the list! We're now #63 out of 209 startups listed, having moved up 31 positions since the last time it was published.