New way to post Feedback

We just noticed a really cool site called GetSatisfaction. It's a customer-focused feedback site where users of any product or service can interact with the company that makes it to ask questions, register complaints, or offer suggestions. Looks like a great idea, and quite well done.

So, give it a try if you have feedback for us at Faves.com!

Two Million Page Views per Month

We've had strong user growth since August, the last time I reported our monthly page views. It's continued through to our re-launch as Faves.com this week. I'm happy to announce that we've doubled the number of visitors and page views in the last three months.

• Monthly visitors: 1 million
• Monthly page views: 2 million

Since we launched in June 2006, we've always attracted a strong international audience (despite having an all English interface). Here's the breakdown of monthly visits by country:

1. 375,000 - United States
2. 150,000 - Italy (!)
3. 100,000 - Japan
4. 75,000 - India
5. 75,000 - United Kingdom
6. 50,000 - Germany
7. 50,000 - Canada
8. 25,000 - Malaysia
9. 25,000 - China

BlueDot.us is now Faves.com!

We have some big changes to report at Blue Dot. The most obvious, is that we've changed our name to Faves.com.

FAQ:

Why did you change your name?

Many users are confused by a .us domain name - so we decided it was time we changed to a more mainstream .com domain.

Do I have to create a new account?

No. You can use the same user name (or email address) and password that you used on BlueDot.us, to sign in to Faves.com.

Will I lose any of my data or settings?

We have preserved all your bookmarks (now called "Faves") on our new web site. You also still have all the same friend relationships, messages, etc. Everything is preserved.

Will my toolbar buttons still work?

Yes. There is nothing you need to do to update your browser toolbar buttons - they will work fine with Faves.com. But, if you want to update to the latest version (with icons that match our new site logo), just visit our toolbar installation page to get the latest version.

What's New at Faves.com?

Besides a name change, we've also been working on a major release with lots of great new features:

• Topic Subscriptions. In addition to seeing bookmarks from your friends, you can now subscribe to topics on Faves.com to see all the newest content about the topics you care about.
• Personalized Home Page. This new page shows you all the most popular Faves from your subscriptions. We also keep track of any Faves you've seen before, so you see only fresh Faves when you click the "unread" button.
• Voting. In addition to commenting on bookmarks, you can now vote them up or down. By clicking the up arrow, you'll help Faves.com identify the best bookmarks for each topic (you can always find Faves you've voted on by visiting your personal Faves page and clicking the Votes tab - so it's a good way to remember the stuff you like).

We hope you like this latest revision of Faves.com. If you have questions or suggestions for ways to improve our service, please feel free to reply to this mail or send them to us at feedback@faves.com.

Images are Back

To follow up on our previous post, we have recovered all the missing images.

For the technical folks out there, here are the steps that worked. After determining our files were striped across three drives in a RAID 5 array, we plugged two of these drives into our 3Ware RAID controller. We then used Raid Reconstructor to create a virtual disk image. Finally, we were able to access the files from this virtual disk image using GetDataBack.

Images Missing | Day 2

Here's an update on our hardware failure yesterday. The short answer is that we're still in the middle of recovering the images, but it's taking longer than expected. New dot images are displaying properly, but the older dots are still missing their thumbnails.

One lesson for us is that a) you can't have too many backup strategies, and b) you should test your backup processes to make sure they work.

The machine that failed in our data center was the master for our thumbnail images. This includes user profile images as well. We used to have a partial backup of these images, but we lost that machine in a separate failure earlier this year.

While we have extensive backup systems in place for user and dot databases, we rationalized that a) this machine has dual drives (a Raid1 disk array) and b) the images are recoverable from the Internet (since this is "just a thumbnail cache"). But we didn't correctly reason that we also have the one and only copy of our user profile pictures stored on this same machine. It's a fairly large dataset with about 1 million images (30+ GB).

We did not have a current backup for this data. Since the machine died, we've been wrestling with migrating the disks to another machine. Part of our trouble is due to inexperience in dealing with the vagaries of how our hardware Raid controller works. It also involved some high-speed runs to Fry's electronics for some needed parts.

We're currently combining several recovery strategies: restoring data from an image backup we made in January, re-thumbnailing images directly from their original Internet locations and using a data recovery tool to recover files from our Raid1 drives. We also finally got a hold of AMCC (manufacturers of our 3Ware Raid controller) today and better understand how to migrate the drives (BTW - I rate their product support as excellent - their support engineer was very knowledgeable and helpful).

Again, I'll update you tomorrow on our progress. Thanks again for your patience and we apologize for any inconvenience this partial site outage is causing you.

Images Missing Today

We had a hardware failure overnight in our data center that is affecting our thumbnail images. We are working now to replace the failed hardware and hope to have everything back up an running later today.

In the meantime, everything else on the service is working properly. You will not lose any information from any of your dots, and the image thumbnails for new dots will be generated when we bring the hardware up again.

We're really sorry for this service interruption. Thanks for your patience.

Dots vs. Facebook's "Posted Items"

A common question I get asked is why someone should use Blue Dot for bookmarking when Facebook has a "Posted Items" feature. Great question! Well, it comes down to Blue Dot really being all about bookmarks -- saving, sharing, discussing, searching, and discovering them. Here are my top reasons. Feel free to add a comment with yours.

Search. You can search your own Dots, your friends' Dots, or everyone's Dots. For example, find a last minute restaurant recommendation by searching your own or your friends' Dots for a restaurant. Or, if you are on the road, do the same in our mobile version.

Organization. You can tag your Dots with different words like "funny" or "restaurant".

• That makes it easy to browse your Dots by topic. You can see the topics I Dot about the most at http://bluedot.us/users/mohit/tags.

• Also, since you automatically get a page for each tag, it's a great way to share certain Dots with certain people. I tag Dots my investment club might find useful with the tag "investment club" and then share the page with my fellow members.

Privacy. Finally, you can choose to share your Dot with everyone, certain friends, or just for yourself. For example, use Blue Dot for private research by creating Dots that only you can see.