Ping.sg economic
The recent ping.sg population boom got me into thinking about some economic stuff. No, I'm not talking about funding for ping.sg, although Uzyn wanted to move to a delicated server which require more funding. Well, that is another topic for another day.
What I wanted to say is, we are encountering a over-supply, under-demand situation. Alot of pings and very few pongs. Having more people joining ping.sg is a good idea. They create more pings which offer everyone more choices. This is over-supply. But not many people are clicking on the links, or pongs. We end up seeing a lot of post with 0 or 1 pongs. This is under-demand.
And if the situtation get worst, it is going to create a problem. This is going to be a major challenge to overcome as the site gets more and more popular.
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One thing I notice, the number of pongs is following the 90-10 rule mentioned by Robert Kiyosaki in the book "Why we want you to be rich".
10 percent of the pings gets 90 percent of the pongs. While the remainding 90 percent of the pings fight for the remaining 10 percent of the pongs. Perhaps its because of the most popular chart on the top of the page.
Or is it because of my ping-pong theory..... Sex and Money attracts the most pongs.
What I wanted to say is, we are encountering a over-supply, under-demand situation. Alot of pings and very few pongs. Having more people joining ping.sg is a good idea. They create more pings which offer everyone more choices. This is over-supply. But not many people are clicking on the links, or pongs. We end up seeing a lot of post with 0 or 1 pongs. This is under-demand.
And if the situtation get worst, it is going to create a problem. This is going to be a major challenge to overcome as the site gets more and more popular.
--------------
One thing I notice, the number of pongs is following the 90-10 rule mentioned by Robert Kiyosaki in the book "Why we want you to be rich".
10 percent of the pings gets 90 percent of the pongs. While the remainding 90 percent of the pings fight for the remaining 10 percent of the pongs. Perhaps its because of the most popular chart on the top of the page.
Or is it because of my ping-pong theory..... Sex and Money attracts the most pongs.
Labels: ping.sg
True....I think this is where Uzyn's plan to implement community groups within ping.sg will be useful...
it'll help segment the pingers and the pongers
Posted by Anonymous | 3/28/2007 12:03:00 PM
That's a very good post!
I agree with you. I sort of see this coming already and it's also partly the reason why I don't make the homepage fully AJAX. That would make things move really fast. Of course another reason is it would be impossible to update the "xxx mins ago" timestamp without incurring a lot of unnecessary bandwidth.
The next features which I hope I would have time to implement soon (sadly that might be at least 1 month from now) are:
1. community gruops as ridz has mentioned.
- That would solve the interest groups problem. Like if you are interest in your colleagues blog, then you can only care about the group homepage to keep track of your colleagues blog.
- This still would not solve the home page issue but at least the distribution of pongs would be better now.
2. Add friends. Ignore users.
- Each users would get a feature to add friends or ignore users/blogs soon.
- This features is needed so that each of us can be our own editor to filter out the noise and only read what we like.
- Friends would be highlighted among the list so you can quickly pick up your friend's pings.
I hope with these 2 features, the problem can be reduced.
Posted by Unknown | 3/28/2007 12:09:00 PM
what is the problem that you are expecting with a low pong? is that a key issue?
Not that i have an answer to it, but since my initial use of ping, i have mainly thought of just sharing some of the happenings at the cafe or some personal thoughts. Whether anyone reads them i not sure if it really matters...
think i have to give this more thought
Posted by Anonymous | 3/28/2007 12:21:00 PM
I've got a RSS Reader. Comes free with Mozilla. Also see Google New RSS Reader.
Posted by Anonymous | 3/28/2007 12:35:00 PM
Astro: What I meant was, everyone only wants to ping but nobody wants to pong.
But you got a point too.
Posted by DK | 3/28/2007 12:38:00 PM
Hi DK,
Yeah, sex and controversy sells no matter what type of aggregator. Of course, I believe that we just contribute as much as we can. If someone appreciates it, it is good enough. :)
Posted by Bernard Leong | 3/28/2007 01:33:00 PM
Would it be safe to say that blog aggregators get more pings than pongs simply because the pongs come from pingers?
Most non-blogging blog readers seldom are aware of blog aggregators... they usually read blogs from friends etc. Or they go to STOMP.
Posted by Anonymous | 3/28/2007 02:29:00 PM
come to think of it, i seldom pong people. When the number of pings in a day overflow one page, how many pongers actually go to the next few pages to see the pings submitted?
It's like a rich-poor gap: those who receive a lot of pongs, will continue to receive more pongs cos it's displayed right at the top. Those who didn't, well they can remain in low ground.
but i think dk you aren't suffering from low pongs =)
Posted by chillycraps | 3/28/2007 02:45:00 PM
Me me me! Usually I will read several pages in Ping.sg cos I know more and more pings are coming in daily and it is fair to read others too.
If I am curious about the ping from the summary, I just pong pong it :)
Posted by Details: | 3/28/2007 10:28:00 PM