I predict that Forty Faces’s success — if it does succeed — will bring its own failure, ultimately. As the number of scanned blogs grows, each blogger’s face will be present on the page for a much shorter time, which will void the basic usefulness of the site: catering to the bloggers’ vanity (including yours truly).
In order to delay the inevitable, I want to suggest Philipp to implement a small change: don’t let each blogger’s face appear more than once in the homepage. Having multiple mugshots of the most prolific bloggers like Scoble or Cory is not fun, after a while. Other bloggers who post less often, but write longer (and maybe more thoughtful) posts, don’t deserve to be pushed off the page so quickly.
I disagree. As long as the quality of posts is high, then there shouldn’t be just one picture for someone. I would have a problem if people started posting just to get on there. If a few people see a post who wouldn’t normally, then it is a success. And over time people will come to know the pictures, and gain an understanding for what each blogger is all about. Then they can stay away from the ones they don’t enjoy reading.
The problem is: people won’t even be able to see the posts from the ones they enjoy if they are being pushed off the page by more prolific bloggers.
First of all, you’re right if the site grows without me changing it, it could “explode” one day. But I don’t intend to put up any of my sites as “finished” products — in fact, my design approach is to change just when necessary but not earlier.
For example, I believe a forum needs threads only if it has more than 1 post a week. And I believe it only needs a expand/collapse multi-thread view if it has around 20 threads per day. It needs moderation only if there’s so much spam you can’t read through it anymore. And so on. With the growth of a community, so must the approachs grow too.
So what happens when the amount of bloggers increase and the amount of new posts is more than 40 per half hour (the current refresh rate)? Just putting up one photo of each won’t be satisfying, because I may want to read all posts of a certain person, and I want to get a feeling how often he posts. After all, I’m linking to the post itself and not the blog.
To make a long story short, if that happens I will start to have blog content categories. The front-page will then change its functionality to “track all bloggers of Forty Faces” to “get completely random blog posts of bloggers of Forty Faces”. But if you want to track a certain topic, like http://www.fortyfaces.com/programming/ or http://www.fortyfaces.com/design/ or http://www.fortyfaces.com/sports/ and so on. This approach is of course expandable in itself by having sub-categories — which again I would only introduce if the single-category approach won’t suffice. Then we’d have http://www.fortyfaces.com/programming/c-sharp/ and so on.
Now here’s a caveat. Up to a certain point, the growth is only limited to my ideas, sure. But as soon as I have 10,000 RSS feeds to scan every thirty minutes, my server limitation itself might pose a problem. And then I have to find ways to grow my server, which I only do if I can find ways to monetize the site; so up to a certain limit, I’m fine with making no money, but as soon as I must pay lots of money for the site, I intend to find an income model *or* limit the amount of bloggers I accept (I can not only do this by shutting down the site, but e.g. by analyzing post frequencies similar to thwat Google does when they check pages — if you never change the RSS, I will check it less and less until the point I might only check it once a month… and as soon as the posting frequency increases, so will my “spider” increase the checks again.)
I am actively thinking of expanding the site into other areas, too. Feedback like this here helps me shape the site, and actually while writing this comment I had a few new ideas
Philipp, I agree with pretty much all you wrote, but in this particular moment most of FortyFaces’ space “above the fold” is monopolized by seven pictures of Nishi. This pushed Wendy Cheng’s picture (who is much cuter than Nishi) down :(.
Maybe you could compress consecutive pictures of the same blogger into one, with some way (a popup div or something) to list all their posts.
I agree having half a dozen pics in a row from one blogger is sub-optimal. If I can find an alternative that’s self-explanatory from just by looking at the page, maybe that would be something to go for. I will keep watching how the site evolves. Maybe (just maybe) this is a weekend phenomenon — only some bloggers post on the weekend.
Hmm. I could put up a limit per hour. But then, what if someone publishes the post of his life (or his week) and it will get lost then?
Guess what, your suggestion was (almost) implemented just now. I had to limit each blogger to a maximum of 3 posts — because the face was filled with almost exclusively one face!