With all the widgets popping up from different websites that allow you to add photos, videos, bookmarks, and tools to your blog, it’s becoming easier and easier to bloat your pages to the point where they start to fall under their own weight.

This was recently illustrated by the case of A VC Blog, where Fred’s site got so bad, it warranted its own “wow, my blog is slow” post. Fred from Webreakstuff gave him the lowdown about what was actually causing the unbearably slow page loads.

With broadband penetration being as high as it is, it’s easy to start ignoring the size of your pages. If you ever hope to be Dugg, you HAVE to mind your load speeds. It’s a lesson we learned the hard way with this blog earlier this month. If you don’t want your first time visitors clicking the “back” button once they get to your blog and want people to actually like coming back and reading your posts, you have to mind your load speeds.

Ask yourself “is this plugin/widget/script adding something useful to my blog or am I really the only one who cares to see my cat’s flickr stream on my business blog?” and “how much does it slow down my site?” It might be time to trim at least a few of them - or maybe move them to their own pages and replace them with a link.

Use the Speed Analysis Tool and check out the stats on your blog. The tool is not perfect (and frankly a little outdated) so don’t take it as gospel but it’s a pretty good starting point. (This blog takes 17 requests and 38k to load. Not too bad.) The “Analysis and Recommendations” at the bottom is really strict in my opinion. It tells you that your site should be 30K or less and your external scripts should be 8K or less. I’m going to guess that if you went by these “Kilobyte Nazi” standards, your site would look and function a little like this. I mean, even Eric Meyer’s website gets a caution.

Audit your blog once in a while.

I’m going to go ahead and make some predictions. I may end up being wrong (not the first time), but this is how I see events unfolding: both Microsoft’s Zune and Playstation’s PS3 will be significant market failures.

There has been a lot of hype around Zune. I think some people will buy them but Apple will remain the leader. This won’t sit well with Microsoft who will keep losing market share in the personal computing market as well. The Zune will be a large waste of their time and money.

Sony’s beleagured PS3 will probably be delayed once more, and will fizzle as it comes out into the market. It will be too expensive, too unreliable, ahead of its time. I believe they tried to do too much and will overstep the market. Nintendo will make a surprising upsurge and take away a lot of the video game market with their new console and portable. Microsoft and Xbox will have a pretty good holiday season, but the real surprise will be Nintendo.

TechCrunch reported on the launch of Media Temple’s new hosting service called Grid Server this morning. It promises to be a new kind of hosting platform that’s priced more like shared hosting ($20/month), but is instantly scalable on demand (more like Amazon’s EC3 computing service).

For $20/month you get 100 GB is storage and 1TB of bandwdth. If you have overages, they charge you incrementally. You can host up to a 100 sites and there’s an option for Ruby on Rails (but only 1 app per account it seems).

I’ve decided to give the Grid Server a spin with one of our projects. Signup was fairly easy, as was setup. I started with a 1-click install of a Wordpress installation and have played around a little bit since then. The control panel is quite intuitive. The site speed seems to be much faster than Dreamhost’s, but that might just be because it’s still a new service and they haven’t been stressed.

I’ll report my experiences after a few weeks/months after we test out the Grid-Server, its capabilities, speed, etc. It’s still too early to tell if the Media Temple Grid $20/mo. service will trump my Dreamhost Shared $8/mo. service (when it comes to real-world usage), but it really does look promising.

They both took their eyes off the ball.

Last night the Cardinals blew a 20 point third quarter lead on one of the messiest comebacks in recent NFL history. How could they have let this happen? It looked like a sure win.

Well, that was Friendster’s thinking in early 2004. Their rival was MySpace but they were just too arrogant to pay them the attention they deserved. The Friendster demise is a really good case study for how to blow a significant lead in the market by tripping over your own self. If you take a look at the top 10 things that will make or break your website, you will see that Friendster broke all 10.

There are two excellent Friendster articles that every entrepreneur should read: The New York Times article (free registration required) and Danah Boyd’s analysis. The Times gives you a more business/management perspective, while Danah’s analyzes the demise from a sociological point of view.

In essence some of the biggest problems were:

• Focusing on new features and pie in the sky issues over the most basic one - that the site did not work (due to scalability issues - at times pages took minutes to load.)
• Trying to innovate on the tech side when easier solutions existed: “We had often chosen the more exotic solution over the more simple solution.” (Mr. Lindstrom - NYT).
• Not innovating on the features side - after a while you ran out of things to do on Friendster.
• Not listening to its core audience and forcing the direction of the company instead of allowing its users to guide it.

Friendster blew a significant opportunity because they really took the eye off the ball and became too complacent.

Whether you’re up 20-0 in a football game or have 20 million more users than your competition, always remember - you’re only 20 minutes or 20 months away from coming in second if you don’t focus on the game.

“Amazon.com has new recommendations for you based on items you purchased or told us you own.”

To this day I keep getting emails about books that I have no interest in reading from Amazon. Just because I ordered a book for a friend who owned a restaurant 3 years ago titled “Cool Restaurants in New York” as a gift does not mean I give two shirts about restaurant design in my day to day life.

When I was a gullible young lad I ordered some book written by Kevin Trudeau and ever since then Amazon has assumed I want to get rich quick or hear about useless business schemes or health products.

I had a similar experience with Target online last year. I had purchased a baby shower gift for a friend and received baby offers for a few months afterwards (which is about as untargeted as it gets), but then it stopped. So I assume Target limits their assumptions.

So Amazon, stop making an ass of u and me (well, mostly u). My tastes and interests change and some were never my own tastes and interests to begin with. You don’t know me and pretending you do annoys the bejesus out of me.