

Only 7 + or - 2 websites - immad
http://www.immadsnewworld.com/2010/11/only-7-or-2-websites.html

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harrybr
"7 plus or minus two" is one of the most misused and misquoted Psychology
research findings ever. It's better to just say "a few" or "a handful" rather
than this as it makes it clear you are being approximate, rather than
attempting to link your argument back to Miller's classic paper

<http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Miller/>

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lazyjeff
Agree. See this article discussing the merits of the original 7 +- 2
statement:

[http://tastyresearch.com/2006/08/30/debunking-the-seven-
plus...](http://tastyresearch.com/2006/08/30/debunking-the-seven-plus-or-
minus-two-myth/)

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notahacker
If I were to deduce a startup strategy from a statistic showing that most
people had 7 +/- 2 regularly visited sites, I'd probably take a different
approach and reach almost the opposite conclusion.

I'd start by thinking of my typical target audience and why my site would
become important enough to be one of the first ten or fewer sites they headed
for when they opened their browser. Surely the most logical way to do that is
to start up with some firm (but testable) assumptions about something that
particular group of people want to do that isn't done well elsewhere. An
incipient platform largely devoid of content is about the last place that
would make my top ten websites to visit; something that solved a problem well
would do even in beta. Being a platform works _after_ people come. Building on
the shoulders of platforms is good advice though.

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benvanderbeek
"Amazon - Leads you to other peoples goods"

I think most people go to Amazon to buy from Amazon, not "other people." As
opposed to eBay and Craigslist, where the above description is accurate.

~~~
wccrawford
No, they go there to buy things. Most of them don't care whether the goods
come from Amazon or not, just that they get a good price.

~~~
benvanderbeek
Right. But if we're talking about content, most people go there because of
Amazon's content, not other merchants. The vast majority of Amazon's revenue
is from their own sales, not merchants'.

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mdda
I check things out on Amazon not for the savings, but for the reviews. And
that's content not created by Amazon. I guess I stick around for the
recommendations - but that's also generated by Amazon analysing other people's
actions.

~~~
benvanderbeek
Good point re: reviews as motivation to visit their site. Being an ecommerce
guy, I was thinking "content" being product data related to products (and
delivery/customer service) that Amazon itself actually sells vs. product data
(and services) provided by 3rd party merchants (like me).

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alanh
Why don’t people use the actual ± symbol in the age of Unicode? It’s a quick
Google search, or Option-Shift-=, away. The title was inscrutable to me, but
7±2 would have made immediate sense.

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Zev
Because unicode support still sucks in a lot of ways. The '—' character
doesn't display always properly on my Prē, for example.

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jimbojohn
Really? Under what circumstances? I'm shocked, actually (not a Prē user).

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Zev
When I viewed a post of mine on HN earlier today with my Prē, the — was
replaced with the typical gibberish instead.

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techbio
7+- is a recognizable red herring. There is a better metaphor, but the title
led me to think directly of the concept "mentally uploaded".

I visit all of the top ten listed, and twenty or more others pretty regularly,
but the idea of a set of web tools makes perfect sense. When web programming
for example I am intensely engaged with reference material
(php.net/python.org/etc..), multilevel searches (Google/stackoverflow),
analytics, hosting, with my surfing ruts, HN and others as a salt.

Similarly an R/C hobbyist might have three manufacturers sites, two forums,
and 0-4 parts/sales/events/magazines/other sites depending on the level of
involvement they want, but I cant imagine really using more than 10 as an
amateur.

For continuous tasks, like programming/work, you need variety but as few
mental leaps as possible. To answer a question about function returns takes a
different form than a library tutorial for PIL, but will come up in the same
context. For occasional but regular things (home, weekends), within a limited
activity, you could group together a small number of loosely joined parts that
satisfy your interest. With these restrictions 7 seems like a ballpark number.

Hooking up a javascript visited link hack to see what other 7 your users
really use could enable you to streamline your service to their habits in some
cases.

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arn
ya, the regular basis is a bit misleading. I expect regular means daily. There
are plenty of sites and traffic serving people on a non-regular basis.

Wikipedia I don't visit daily, and I'd suggest the vast majority of people
don't visit it daily. But I visit it when I'm looking for something.

Same with Amazon, IMDB, and a ton of other massive sites.

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yatsyk
>most people go to around seven sites +/- 2 on a regular basis

what "regular basis" means? every day, every week?

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nikcub
In the desktop software world it was often cited that in the lifetime of a PC
on average only 6 pieces of software are installed.

I wonder if this number is arbitrary, or there is something to it.

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archangel_one
I'm not sure I believe it... technical users seem likely to install more apps
than that (especially on Windows, where you need to install a bunch of things
in order for it to be able to do anything) and every time I see a computer
belonging to a "nontechnical" user it's full of little gizmo apps and cruft
everywhere.

For every computer with 24 variants of Comet Cursor installed, there have to
be three with just the bare OS to counterbalance it. I can imagine being able
to use Ubuntu without installing a bunch of extra stuff, but I doubt that's
what they were thinking of originally :)

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jw84
I sometimes will go to which ever site automatically pops up first when I type
the first letter.

Eg.

a -> apple.com

b -> my blog's wp-admin login

c -> google.com

and so on.

