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.

I’ve been looking at the traffic stats from this week’s Digg spike in our logs. Here are some observations about the 21,000 visits we’ve received so far:

BROWSERS

• 64.42% use Firefox
• 20.02% use IE
• 9.82% Safari
• 3.11% Opera

PLATFORMS

• 75.92% Windows
• 18.69% Mac
• 5.06% Linux

SCREEN RESOLUTIONS

• 30.83% 1280 x 1024
• 27.15% 1024 x 800
• Less than 1.5% use 800X600 or lower

About 40 to 45 % have Flash 9+ installed. Digg drove a little more than half of all traffic within the last 3 days with the following break down: Day 1 – 72% of traffic, Day 2 – 31% of traffic, Day 3 – 21% of traffic. So basically Digg is like a giant filter that feeds out to the rest of the web/blogosphere, since now we have a ton of referrers.

These stats are definitely from the web crowd and are SOOO different than the stats I see on “normal” non-tech-focused websites (you know, the ones outside our echo-chamber – the ones visited by the people who make up the rest of the 95% of the population.)

For instance, Firefox penetration usually runs around 15% for other sites I’ve monitored – generally between 6% and 25%. Also, 5% of Linux users is quite high compared to 0.10% to 0.5% that I usually see.

The lesson: know your specific audience, look at your stats and don’t generalize. Averages are dangerous.

My Future of Web Apps post made the front page of Digg yesterday, so I got to learn what it’s like to ride the Digg wave. It was an interesting trip to say the least.

I posted the entry yesterday morning, Dugg it once myself, and messaged a few friends to check it out. I then went about my day and in the early afternoon came back to find my site was down. I checked Digg and there it was: #6 in the list. Whoo hoo!

A Diggaggle⁽¹⁾ had already started flaming the site in the comments for being down. Now I myself appreciated the irony of the article ending in “…Break Your Website”. However, I didn’t really anticipate it making the front page, especially when others in the blogosphere had better coverage of the event and had posted about it much earlier.

I emailed Dreamhost as soon as possible about the site being down and called up Duane (the other half of AU Interactive) to redirect the DNS to our own server so we could put up a temporary page. (This blog is hosted on a separate shared account which usually suffices for small projects.) My email to Dreamhost had the following subject line: “Site Dugg! Is Down! Please send reinforcements!” and body: “I just got Dugg! Site is down! Please help!”

I was a little surprised to get the following email back from them about 15 minutes later:

Can you please explain what Dugg is? It appears you are being DDOS’ed … Your apache server was using up almost all of the system resources … Server uptime: 5 minutes 57 seconds … Total accesses: 5675 - Total Traffic: 4.5 MB … CPU Usage: 93.3% CPU load. 15.9 requests/sec - 13.0 kB/second - 835 B/request … 250 requests currently being processed … in short it is crashing the server.

It was kind of unexpected that they weren’t aware of Digg and the “Digg Effect”– I sort of assumed that a large hosting company would be on top of things like this. They renamed the folder to prevent the server from crashing as a temporary fix.

As soon as the DNS propagated, our servers were taking a brunt of the hits – within about an hour, we had received 4,000+ unique visitors. Duane informed me that the page was pretty bloated (300K+). AHA! That was my mistake. I had installed a number of plugins without thinking too much about it and it really “obesified” my pages. I had the wp-cache plugin activated which helped, but the extra plugins, namely Lightbox V2 (which uses prototype and scriptaculous libraries, both of which are a bit hefty ) were really to blame.

So I took out the unnecessary JS and waited for the traffic to die down. Duane let me know when the server relaxed a bit so I renamed the folder back at Dreamhost and changed back the DNS to point to its proper home.

Later in the evening Dreamhost responded again, explaining the situation and noting that currently the server appeared to be having a normal level of traffic. This is the only problem I’ve ever had with them, so I’ll probably stick with them, even after this fiasco. Plus they have a nice affilate program. *wink*

Now I’m just moderating comments and having fun with it. Thank you to everyone who took the time to give their feedback. I’ll leave you with some fun screenshots from yesterday:

This is kind of funny: The Digg mirror advertising the very service that couldn’t handle the site traffic.

Yes, I just coined a new term:

Diggaggle: n. 1. A gaggle of Diggers. 2. A rowdy group of commenters who leave snide remarks. Usage: “I just had a pile of virtual poo tossed my way by a bloodthirsty Diggaggle” [Origin: 2006 from Digg (n.) social networking site, and gaggle (n.), a “flock of geese when not flying”. Hence Diggaggle: a "flock of geeks".]