
Learning from StackOverflow.com - babyshake
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWHfY_lvKIQ
======
scorpion032
Here is my quick notes from the video:

Search engines are not giving solutions to expert questions which an expert
can answer well. So Yahoo answers and such sites got started.

People will come and behave the way U build stuff, thats how anthropology
works.

Spanish Rome Church became living room, because of its location and
appropriately sized stairs Yahoo Answers attracted teenagers and there are
questions like "How is babby formed" Mahalo Answers attracts scammers thanks
to earning mahalo dollars for things.

Experts Exchange is a corporate enterprise startup, they show a diff page to
google, and ask U to pay money to see it.

Askville of amazon also emphasised asking questions and lot of questions went
unanswered, UI is like phpBB.

SO released in Sep 2008 had a 4 week private beta. Now seeing 6 million visits
a month, 3 million unique visitors

Problems with search engines for Expert Questions:

Wrong answers: Find answers like "Turn off Firewall" "No Pagerank to a lot of
technical answers" only 100 people want to discuss that. No inbound links.

Search Engines have these probs: Rare questions. Few people discussing about
it Not many inbound links for a better PR Too many ways to phrase problems and
lost in keywords Preference for old links

The SO 9 point Social Engineering solution: Anthropologically right to solve
problems and lead people to behave in a particular way

* Voting: Reddit, Digg way. But asker gets to choose a right answer, irrespective of the community

* Tagging: Usenet web1.0 hierarchy Each tag has a view. Users can choose tags for their view and remove tags from their view, the system itsef also figures which tags U want to see

* Editing: Wikipedia like, Most forum software turn up old answers, those in 2000 and it becomes obsolete. User himself or others can edit stuff

* Badges: Xbox stuff, Highlight people's compatencies People will try to get badges

* Karma: U cant just pay people to answer ques. Goog Answers failed and Mahalo w'd do the same, perhaps because "People w'd try to answer questions for free to contribute to the world" Increase user previleges with karmas

* Pre-Search: Method to prevent duplicates. Works even without any fancy searching algorithm, just search on full text, on SQL

* SEO: 86% of traffic is from google. Better urls. proper meta tags. live brings in 0.2% traffic

* Performance: M$FT stack. C# compiled language good performance. 16 million pages a month 2 servers a web server and a sql server MS SQL 08. 8 core zion processors we use only a tenth of the hardware as used for similar other sites. The software licenses more than pay for themselves

* Critical Mass: People who answer que shd be there. "Empty restaurant Syndrome" shdn't happen Joelonsw had a million hits a month and codinghorror had 300k

* Status Report: so podcast also brought in many listeners. tens of thousands 140k questions asked 91.3% answered Linear growth of posts (700k in march), registered users(50k in mar) to

MSFT says 9 million professional programmers in world. So, SO has 30% market
share.

* Stats: 3 million unique visitors, 6 million views, 16 million page views traffic: 86% from google, 5% referral sites, 8% direct traffic- community

Future: building serverfault, for professional sys administrators. Not people
who want to plug ipod may be also for tax accountants and other such vertical
groups Also looking at but dont want to talk about recruiting market place.

Best SO aspect: Otherwise, we never care for que posting, but only for
searching, as it doesnt give expert answers in real time. Now it is unified.

Licencing it to others: Not right now, as we dont have resources but may be,
why not

Worst SO aspect: Closing questions that are not programming is ugly.

Monitization: Ads, a few of them, whoever banged our door themselves. 4 people
and 2 servers doesnt cost much.

Que from Guido: things U shd not do part1: Not from scratch. Netscape to Moz
rewrite was a screw up which let ie takeup. where is things U shd not do
part2?

Que from Jon Skeet: I read on codinghorror that new Que and posts are not
increasing as expected. Does it bother U?

