The Not-Really-That-Much-Hype Cycle

So TheRealURL extension got “public” status at the addons.mozilla, and I guess it was on the “new add ons” or similar page for some time, which resulted in some nice graphs:

This is after about a week of pretty much flat lines, when it was still in the sandbox. The red line active daily users. Nothing crazy, but nice steady growth, all in all. I really like the way the blue line – daily downloads – matches nicely to the Hype Cycle line:

Well, there wasn’t that much “Peak of Inflated Expectations” so the “Trough of Disillusionment” wasn’t that deep either ;). 1,522 downloads in total so far, in about 2 weeks.

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Crowds Machine, Day 1

I’ve been working on Crowds Machine for a while, starting this an idea long ago and running it for my personal use for about three years now, but only recently I took some time to make it publicly usable – the first users I don’t personally know showed up only in the last 24 hours, following its mention in Waxy.org Links.

Here’s what this first public day looks like in traffic:

Keeping in mind it’s Christmas, and the site was down for a while till I fixed up the server, I’m pretty happy with that. But the real surprise is here:

There were less than 10 crowds in the system, so this means 1 in every 4 new visitors created a crowd. That’s pretty incredible. Maybe the holiday timing helped here. Maybe allowing users to log in with their Google accounts. Having to process 12,274 feeds a day might prove a bit of a challenge though…

I always assumed there’s a high entry barrier for CM users since they have to load in quite a few feeds to make it useful. Visitors so far seem to have no issues with that, most just importing their feeds list via OPML. Obviously these are not the typical Web users, but that’s ok. Crowds Machine isn’t meant to be mainstream – that’s the whole point of it.