Clicky Blog

> A lot of people very clearly are willing to update every three months.

...and a lot of people very clearly are not. So now what? We say, "this doesn't work for lots of people", you counter-point that it does work for a lot of people ... both statements are true and nothing has been accomplished.

> And for people using Chrome, they get updates even more frequently.

And for people using Internet Explorer, they get updates much less frequently. Guess which browser still has the lion's share of the market? (Hint: http://getclicky.com/marketshare/global/web-browsers/)

> When the upgrading is painless, no one minds doing it.

Right, and that's the rub! Upgrading is not painless! I think you, and I, and Silhouette are in agreement here: if upgrading were painless, no one would mind doing it. The problems seems to be that for you, "painless" means, "I have to download and install it", and for us, "painless" means, "we have to answer support calls about what happened to the bookmarks menu and why X page is no longer working even though it was two weeks ago and by the way the back button looks different and I don't think I like this new version..."

> If you are not willing to update, you're not getting security updates anyway.

Nobody's objecting to security updates!

This very statement is so indicative of what the problem is here: that security updates are being conflated with application updates. Security updates are fine! Corporate IT will almost always roll out a revision…

SSL adds latency, because you're setting up an encrypted connection. Google hates slowing down users, and we don't want to slow down every user unless it's a clear win. That's one reason.

When Google switched to AJAX-based search, that temporarily stopped sending referrers, and lots of people screamed bloody murder. For example, http://getclicky.com/blog/150/googles-new-ajax-powered-search-results-breaks-search-keyword-tracking-for-everyone said "So what can we do about it? If you run a blog, write about this. Submit this story or your own story to large tech blogs like TechCrunch, CenterNetworks, ReadWriteWeb, GigaOm, etc - no large site has written about this yet, and one of them needs to. ... Do anything you can to spread the word and let Google know that this is not acceptable."

Or see http://www.seobook.com/Ad-Networks-Partners-Hoarding-Publisher-Data-For-Profit or http://econsultancy.com/us/blog/3240-google-ajax-bad-news-for-third-party-analytics-providers or http://blogs.sitepoint.com/2009/02/04/google-update-breaks-third-party-analytics-tools/ . So we heard lots of complaints.

SSL as an option provides a nice choice for people who care about these issues and don't mind taking a tiny hit in latency.

Side projects are where it's at, because they're typically low cost up front. You're just doing it for yourself. If no one likes it then you can ditch it or just use it for yourself for whatever purpose. No big loss. But if it turns out you're building something that people are passionate about, then you can turn it into a business without all the risk of going into it like a business from the very beginning.

http://getclicky.com started as an internal project for another company I worked for a few years ago. It was profitable 4 months after launch, and revenues are doubling ever year. 2010 will be about $1M. We are happy with that.

A few that I swear by:

github http://github.com for source control and wikis

sendgrid http://sendgrid.com or Amazon SES for email

mogotest http://mogotest.com for browser testing

recurly http://recurly.com for managing recurring payments

tender http://tenderapp.com for support / help desk

linode http://linode.com for hosting or Amazon EC2

mocksup http://mocksup.com for quick and easy mockups

clicky http://getclicky.com for analytics

zerigo http://www.zerigo.com for dns and monitoring

AWS http://aws.amazon.com S3, EC2, and everything else :)

Here are some better places to get real stats on browser usage:

http://marketshare.hitslink.com/

http://gs.statcounter.com/

http://getclicky.com/marketshare/global/web-browsers/

Your own browser stats are skewed at this moment, I wouldn't base any important decisions on them.

One interesting tidbit from Statcounter:

In Europe FF usage has caught up to IE, they are both around 40%.

In North America IE has double the usage of FF, with IE at ~50%.

As far as I understand something similar already exists, at least twice. I only remember the whereabouts of one of those. It's a service launched recently by the people from Clicky Analytics. It's called Contenture.

See here:

http://contenture.com/

http://getclicky.com/blog/164/announcing-contenturecom-a-new-micropayment-service-from-the-creators-of-clicky