

Scribd is now the largest Rails site on the Internet (using Alexa rankings) - michelson01
http://rails100.pbwiki.com/?

======
michelson01
Scribd is growing quickly and actively hiring all kinds of developers (ruby on
rails, flash/actionscript, C++, etc) so please contact us, hackers@scribd.com,
if you're interested. Check out our jobs page here:
<http://www.scribd.com/static/jobs>

Here's a link to our traffic graph on alexa:

<http://snipurl.com/24rqq>

------
sdurkin
The first time I used Scribd's iPaper I thought, "This is magic." Its one of
those products that, as a web developer, you'd have to be stupid not to use.
Its simply that much better than its competitors. Congratulations, guys.

~~~
ken
Can you explain the magic? I just don't get it. (Maybe I am stupid; I'll admit
that much.)

From what I've seen, it looks like a Flash plugin to view PDFs. It breaks my
scroll-wheel and keyboard shortcuts, uses funny-looking controls, and it takes
as long to load the Flash plugin as it would have to just load the whole PDF.
I always edit the URL so I can view the PDF normally. I don't know why I'd
want to do this to my users.

~~~
xlnt
doesn't in-browser pdf viewing suck apart from safari?

~~~
amichail
I don't understand scribd's popularity. What's wrong with pdfs?

~~~
xlnt
i never liked acrobat reader on windows much. maybe that's it? or people just
don't know where to host their pdfs. or don't know how to make pdfs.

~~~
amichail
So maybe the popularity comes out of ignorance?

~~~
xlnt
yes. but that's not necessarily a bad thing to say about scribd. if scribd
makes it easier for people to not know anything about how to use computers,
then that's valuable to lots of people.

~~~
amichail
Scribd should win some award for being the most counterintuitive successful
startup. It's hard to imagine that computer science majors came up with this
idea!

~~~
xlnt
youtube doesn't do much besides make a few things easy: make a file web
accessible and convert to another format and provide comments and some text
people can paste to embed it, and i guess favorites and a bit more -- all the
kinds of things scribd has i think. plus give away free storage space and
bandwidth, which scribd does too.

------
michelson01
yeah, this is using alexa rankings, so it's far from perfect and misses a lot
of other data, so take it for what it's worth.

~~~
dshah
Alexa did a major update to it's ranking algorithm and source data yesterday.
It's supposedly a lot better.

~~~
paul9290
yes ... though it depends who you ask. Many like hacker news rankings went
down. Was 14K two days ago... now 77K, while looking down next to my alexa
toolbar ranking of this site I have the compete toolbar that says hacker news
is ranked 25K. Though compete only measures US traffic, best of my knowledge.
Scribd was ranked 900 something now its 500 something. Congrat to Ed K and the
Scribd team!

------
pg
Wow, I didn't know that. This is a handy site.

~~~
rokhayakebe
Double Wow, I didn't know Sribd is bigger than Yellow Pages

------
tlrobinson
That's great for Scribd, not so great for Rails. The largest (known) Rails
site isn't even in the top 500!

I'm curious how this compares to other technologies. Someone should write a
script that crawls the top sites attempting to detect the technologies they're
built on.

I can think of a few heuristics, like URL patterns and file extensions (.php,
etc) and cookies (PHPSESSID for PHP, _session_id for Rails, JSESSIONID for
J2EE, etc)

------
mattmaroon
What was previously?

~~~
PStamatiou
twitter?

------
richcollins
That doesn't count desktop twitter clients.

It also doesn't count Facebook apps.

------
maurycy
What about yellowpages.com?

~~~
mhartl
They're #2 according to the article.

------
markbao
Scribd looks great, but Basecamp is down at 70262, probably since it uses
subdomains. Full aggregated traffic for Basecamp and other 37signals
properties would probably put it higher up on the list.

~~~
mattmaroon
Highly doubt it. They have a lot of signups, but I bet a lot fewer active
users. Scribd claims over 17m uniques a month.

Though I bet 37 Signals financial statement looks a lot better.

------
blader
The two largest Rails deployments on the internet are not on that list.

~~~
sanswork
Could you please elaborate more on what those two deployments are?

