Learning2.0 : Journey to about2findout.com

I just chaired a knowledge exchange session with a table full of people here at the Online Educa Berlin conference. It was about my hobby for the past year and so: this site. As you are reading this blog, you are probably familiar with my experiment to create 'something learning 2.0', so I will not cover the setup of the site. I had different cards on the table with topics the people could choose from. As I have no secrets about that, here is what was shared:

- SOCIAL SIMPLE STYLE
These have been the guiding mottos for making the site. I especially struggled with style, as I'm not any good at graphical design. Luckily there are free sites around to generate logo's or background colors. Other things: don't make your site's visitors feel alone on any page, and stick what the basics of what web sites do. It's what people understand.

- IF YOU BUILD IT, WILL THEY COME?
No. Just building and having a site will do no good. By far the most traffic was generated to the site by Google advertisements. (see further). But there was also word of mouth. Especially helpful was the listing in the Museum of Modern Beta's blog, killerstartups.com, and a few other sites that list new web 2.0 applications. Post your site to del.icio.us, make YouTube video of it, Stumble it (the biggest single day traffic was because one day the site was featured on StumbleUpon),... Furthermore, I get a lot of repeat traffic by the Friday Quizday newsletter.

- OpenID
Was to difficult to implement when I started building the site, but now there are both enough providers for it, as components to hook into your site. It lowers the threshold of people to register or login to your site.

- TECHNICALITIES
I have chosen asp.net with ajax. But there is no philosophy or religion involved in that choice. Good sites can be made with Java, PHP, Flash, asp.net, ruby... or anything else. Just go with what you feel best with or have the most experience or affinity with. I also host this site on seekdotnet.com. A few times the site has been down, but hey, you can't expect miracles for 20$ a month, and that's ok for a hobby site. I used as much as possible free tools and all the web 2.0 goodies around : RSS feeds, tag clouds, links to people, permanent beta, star rating, ...

- READ / WRITE
Read: there are 881 registered users on the site, a fraction of the 48000 visits this year that were mostly anonymous. Write: From those 800+ people, only 39 have created questions, which is about 4%. That is not a lot. Is creating questions to hard to do? It takes more than uploading a picture or typing in a single line of text... Or do quizzers like to consume more than they contribute? Of the 39, only 10 are very active contributors. But all in all, I prefer to have a few good contributors, than a lot of people who put nonsense or bad quality trivia on the site.

- THE NUMBERS
The site after 1 year has 186 quizzes, 881 users and 1907 questions. The top countries are USA, India, Philippines, UK, Belgium. In total 48000 visits were logged.

- PURPOSE
For long the site lacked a purpose, apart from just gaining points and having an accuracy. But the hall of fame and the League of Smartiepants overcomes that: now you can grow your smartiepants color like the belts of karate. Highest score after one year is 3697 points. Most popular quizzes are on capitals, english and IQ.

- LEARNING SITE IN DISGUISE
This is always intended as a learning project, although most people see it as a game. And that's intentional. Asking and reflecting on questions is a very natural form of learning, and there are little things that underline the learning nature of the site: first time you get an answer wrong, nothing happens and you just can read the feedback, more information, relevant links, etc. When a month or more later you get the same question wrong again, points go off. So learning is rewarded. The challenge feature where you bet your points on others not knowing things has proven less popular than foreseen. But a lot of people have told me they learn a lot while playing the quizzes, and that's the whole point anyway.

- BREAKING OUT OF THE SITE
I've created FriendsIQ on Facebook, a mobile application and a Google Gadget to bring the content outside the site's boundaries. I never found the time to create an API, but maybe the future will bring that... On the mobile application: it is not a very visited part of the site inspite of all the buzz about mobile applications. It looks like an iPhone application, but actually is a regular web site technology. There is not one single standard to develop for mobile phones, it is different for Nokia, Windows Mobile, iPhone, Android, ... As the newer generation mobiles has found ways to make normal web pages work on their device, that's a safer choice and one a hobbiest can afford.

- ADVERTISING
I use Google Adsense and Adwords. Adsense is the program where you earn money by showing advertisements on your site. Every time someone clicks on the advertisement above the questions, I get 1c or more. In total so far I have earned 318$ the last 1,5 year in advertising income. That doesn't cover the 20$ a month I pay for hosting. I also use Adwords, which is paying for advertisements on other sites to convince people to visit my site. I have turned ads on and off regularly, and spend in total 418 euro to get 20241 clicks and 11 million impressions. It's a hobby, it costs what a hobby costs...

- MAKING QUESTIONS WITH EASE
I put a lot of effort in making the Author Zone as easy as I could while still assuring quality trivia. The difficulty level of questions is for example automatically adjusted. And the fill in the blank question type tries to be a bit more intelligent than just comparing what your types with the provided answer. The input type also restricts you from answering with a wrong type of answer (like a number, date, one word or more, etc), and if your answer resembles close enough, you get a second chance.

Well, that's the most we talked about that I can remember...

Labels: about2findout.com, oeb08, tomatoes are fruit

I've been running Google Ads for 3 euro a day for the whole month, and it paid off. November was a record month, although I haven't had the time to do much myself or make a lot of quizzes as I was travelling India on a tour.

There were 11578 visits resulting in 112233 pages being viewed. The top visiting countries were India, Philippines, USA, UK and Vietnam.

Labels: about2findout.com

In October, the number of visits dropped to 4485 (from 8932 last month). The difference is that last month I had Google ads running all month, and this month I did not advertise or promote at all. So I consider this the 'natural' visits. Most came from the USA.

One big exception: on Oct 18 we had the highest peak off all time (over 1200). I didn't even know the site could cope with that much traffic :-). The reason is that that day by coincidence StumbleUpon must have featured us, as it's all Stumble traffic. So not counting for that means 3200 visits a month without promotion, which isn't bad.

Oh, and this month I'll run ads again.

Labels: about2findout.com

FriendsIQ is a social quiz application you can find on Facebook here. It tests your FriendsIQ, which is the sum of what you know plus what your friends know.



How does it work?

On the main screen you see your own score (a FriendsIQ is expressed as x = y + z with x your total score, y what you answered, and z what your friends answered for you. You also see how much you gave and up to 10 friends of you gave to other users.

Below the logo is the main menu to get you to the about page, and the questions page. On the welcome screen you also see outstanding help requests from friends who delegated a question to you.

On the questions page, you see your 5 questions, or at least a short version of it. You have the option to solve it yourself, or ask a friend. If you ask a friend the request is valid for one week. After that you can generate a new question with the 'new question' button. You also get to see up to 5 oustanding help requests from your friends.

Every time a question is answered correctly or wrongly by either you or a friend, the background color will show, and you can generate the next question.


On the question page, you have one of 5 types of questions taken from the about2findout.com site. At the bottom you see if you are answering the question for yourself or for a friend. Every correct answer gains a point, every wrong answer subtracts a point.

I hope you all have great fun finding out your friendsIQ!

Labels: about2findout.com, friendsiq

I've been working on a Facebook application that uses trivia questions from this site. I intended it to be a real social application, so not just another way of doing trivia quizzes on your own just like you can do on about2findout. It's called FriendsIQ, and it tests the combined smarts of yourself and your network of friends, and above all your capability to know what to ask to who.

I found that debugging a social application takes more time than debugging a regular one, specially since you're not allowed to have a multitude of Facebook users to test with. I'm still working on some bugs.

There are two ways to create a Facebook application: in FBML (Facebook's own markup language) or via an iframe. An iframe is basically a piece of the browser window that gets its content from an independent other site. And that's what I used. So on FriendsIQ, what you see is actually pages that are on my own site about2findout.com within the Facebook canvas. Either way you first have to register your application on Facebook and apply for an application and secret key. (And that is fast and free.)

As the site is written in asp.net, I needed components to create Facebook applications on that platform. I wasted a day trying to get the Facebook Toolkit to work. It's an open source project on Codeplex, and a further evolution of Microsoft's toolkit. And it might be a great thing, but it's just too damn hard for a non-die hard programmer to get it to work, specially since Facebook itself has changed quite a lot. The samples don't work, and there is no documentation to get you started. You need to search for hours on the internet to figure out how it works. So I leave the toolkit for those who know how to read the source code and figure it all out, and switched to the much simpler Facebook.NET, also hosted as an open source on Codeplex. I got the major things working, although the new way of handling feed messages is not supported in this project (yet).

Here are some links that really saved me hours of headaches and got me started:
http://www.stevetrefethen.com/blog/VSNETStarterKitForNikhilKotharisFacebookNET.aspx
http://www.nikhilk.net/FacebookNET.aspx
http://www.marketing-ninja.com/old-stuff/why-im-switching-to-facebooknet-from-the-facebook-developers-toolit/
http://www.marketing-ninja.com/old-stuff/5-facebooknet-development-tips/

Labels: about2findout.com, facebook, facebook.net, friendsiq

September was a record month. Top day was 25th September with 485 visitors. In total there were 8932 visits, with an average of almost 10 pages per visit. Lots of new registered users too.

It didn't come about just like that: the top weeks I had Google Ads running for 4 euro per day. Just the same, I'm very glad with the results. But it does show the limits of the site, some of the top days I noticed the site was down for 15 minutes because of the higher traffic.

This month I won't run any advertisements, just to see what is left when not promoting the site.

Labels: about2findout.com, google analytics

Today I experimented with Windows Live authentication. Microsoft has opened up its enormous 'Live' database of accounts (like hotmail.com or live.com), for other sites to use to log in users. It's the successor of MS Passport and free this time. There are more than 350 million Live accounts out there.

It's not like OpenID at all, but since I've implemented that yesterday, I enlarged the concept to also include Live ID Authentication. On the login page you can now choose to login with your traditional about2findout account, an OpenID or a Live ID.

To enable your site for Live ID authentication, you need to register first at Microsoft's site. You need to have the name of the application and a secret key, and where to send the response back.
On your site, you need to include the login button (an iframe script), and retrieve the userid that the Live ID server sends back to you on the page you specified during registration. Use the code from the free Web Authentication SDK.
Because that is all you get: if a user succesfully logs on with their Live ID, you won't get anything but a unique UserID. That means it is up to your site to get email, a friendly username, and other settings you might need. That UserID you can then use to store user information and de the normal login. The way I've implemented it, I store the UserID I get from the LiveID server in my users table, and create a regular account for them behind the screen. Much like I've done for the OpenID implementation in my previous post.

Useful links:
- Peter Bromberg's blog
- public Info Tech blog
- MSDN

PS At the moment, openid and live id are only implemented at the about3findout experimental site, they'll come to the main site when all testing is done.

Labels: about2findout.com, liveid

What is OpenID?
OpenID is an open, vendor neutral way of signing into web sites via one single account. No longer do you need to remember passwords for every single site (such as about2findout), but you can use your OpenID with all participating websites. An OpenID looks like a URL. You might actually have an OpenID already without knowing, as Flickr, Yahoo, Blogger and various other accounts can be used as OpenID. On a participating website, just provide your OpenID URL. You will be redirected to the OpenID provider (Yahoo, MyOpenID, Blogger, Flickr) for the normal signin, and redirected back to about2findout. For more information on OpenID, have a look at: http://openid.net/.

I've been looking at OpenID when first thinking about this site now two years ago, but at that time things were too complicated for me to incorporate that into an asp.net site. I'm not a die hard programmer, I need ready-made components I can plugin. Now I deemed the time right to add OpenID support to the site, as there is an excellent open source tool for adding it to asp.net sites : dotnetopenid. I still had a few more strange and exotic bugs and struggled 2 days with it, but I think I got it working OK now.

I've got about2findout.com to accept OpenID logins as well as our own accounts (the own a2fo accounts will not go away, this is just a new way of signing in). On the login page, there will be an additional box for your OpenID URL. If it is the first time you login via OpenID, you will be asked to accept the code of conduct and provide or confirm your e-mail address. As many users of the site have Yahoo accounts, I hope this will get more new visitors to login and gather points as there is no more need to set up a separate account.

Technically speaking
- I used the dotnetopenid latest version (2.5 at the time of writing). I experimented with the login box they provide, but that won't go together on the same login page as the traditional asp.net one, so I did the OpenID login programatically.

- There were two articles I found VERY useful, and recommend you to read them if you want to do something similar: Dan Hounshells blog and Andrew Jones' blog.

- I created myself a free MyOpenID.com account for testing.

- The documentation is not clear on that, but the dotnetopenid State object that can store the information you get back from the openid provider only works when you copy the state.aspx file to the app_code folder.

- The dotnetopenid login component works well, but gives error in a multilingual site like mine. I usually bind properties to language resources, but that gave strange behaviors with this component, so I didn't use it further.

- The xrds.asp link on the home page gave strange errors about header cannot be modified. Turns out the xrdspublisher by default does its magic via headers and that screws up the page refreshing I have implemented in Ajax on the main page. (The main page shows a new question every 30 seconds.) So I changed the mode of that component and it worked.

- You cannot rely on getting extra information back from the OpenID provider. That's why I redirect to a 'complete registration' page for new OpenID logins. At a minimum, I need everyone to agree with the house rules of the site. Once they confirm, a regular asp.net account is created for them in the normal way, with a random password.

- I'm using the javascript from IDSelector.com to get a nicer OpenID box. The JavaScript makes it easier for people to enter the correct URL. Most people will have an OpenID without knowing. The only big site missing in the whole OpenID movement is the traditional one: Microsoft with the competing LiveID.

As for now, the code has been released to the test site about3findout.com. When it works well with all kind of OpenID accounts, I'll release it to the main site about2findout.com.

Labels: about2findout.com, dotnetopenid, openid

It has been a record week for the site: we passed 160 quizzes, someone scored 1187 points in one week time (anandvymutt423), and two days ago we had 478 visitors, which is a new day record. Glad to see so many people like the site and contribute their questions.

Here are the latest quizzes:





http://www.about2findout.com/findout/doquiz_7of9.aspx?quiz=ASYER

Labels: about2findout.com

I've experimented with Google Gadgets. Gadgets are little pieces of web applications that you can plug into your personalized home page such as iGoogle or add to the Google sidebar.

The one I made simply lists a random trivia question, taken from the about2findout.com database, and refreshes it every 5 minutes. If you hover over the questions you get the full question and question type, and there's a button to show another random question. Plain and simple.
Clicking on the question will open a new browser window on the site itself where you can do the question as you usually would. I choose not to implement the answering logic in the gadget itself because that would make things much more complicated, and I need people to go to the site to answer questions otherwise I loose all statistics and tracking of answer questions.

There is a very nice tutorial on creating Google Gadgets here:
http://www.seoish.com/how-to-make-google-gadgets/
I especially like the interactive part where you add gadgets with video explanation next to the Google Gadget editor. Google Gadgets are nothing more than xml files that describe the gadget's properties and logic. The logic can either be written in javascript, or redirected to another URL, and that last option is what I've done. It saves me the trouble of having to rewrite everything in javascript, but especially allows for people that are logged in to keep their credentials via the normal way. There is more detail on Google's Code site on creating and publishing gadgets.

This is the first of what I hope will be many ways to open up the site to the rest of the web. About2findout.com was never meant to be a locked database. After the screens, I've implemented a module to randomly generate 20 questions every minute. It's that module that feeds the Google Gadget and any other way of sharing I'll add in the future. It keeps the calculations on the site down (although I don't know how this behaves under heavy traffic), and avoids bots to suck out all questions and answers from the site. There are only 20 questions per minute. Should be enough for the real people among us.

To check out the Gadget or add it to your page:
Add to iGoogle
Add to webpage

Labels: about2findout.com, gadget, googlegadget

On widgetbox.com, you can create and share widgets. Widgets are small parts of web pages that you can insert in your site, blog, personal homepage such as iGoogle or NetVibes or social site such as Facebook.

Creating the widget based on the RSS feed of my quiz site was fairly easy. Not sure what I can do with the widget now, but hey, at least I have a widget shared with the world :-).

Labels: about2findout.com, widget

We passed the 1500 questions mark on the site today!

Labels: about2findout.com

The home page of about2findout.com is renewed. First of all, there is a new slogan for the site. Instead of 'quiz 2.0 has arrived', it is now 'what do you know?'. The main page still has the same general navigation at the top, but the search link is now on the right top accessible anywhere. The center of the new home page has two colored pieces: one for the quiz zone and one for the author zone, with many direct useful links. Every 30 seconds, a new random question and associated author are shown.

Another new feature is the page 'All questions', that as the name suggests shows a list of all published questions in the database. You can order the list by clicking on the column headings, and you can filter it by language and filter out questions you have already done.

Last but not least, there is a 'Tell a Friend' page that allows you to send an e-mail message to invite a friend to check out the site.

The Hall of Fame page shows the 50 highest scores by default, or the 50 highest accuracies, 50 most recent, most difficult, most popular or best rated questions. And when you have answered a question, the left bar shows a link to the quiz the question is part of, if any.

Labels: about2findout.com

Today about2findout.com reached 900 questions. Up to the 1000 milestone!

Labels: about2findout.com, news

This month, the site had 2731 visitors that did on average 7 pages per visit and came from 83 countries. The top visiting countries are in order: USA, India, UK, Belgium, Canada.

The most popular quiz was the Capitals quiz. In April 17 quizzes, 46 new people and 139 questions were added to the site, and Dailydog had the top score, and India was the top scoring country. Except for 1 week, there were no special advertisement or other promotion campaigns. The peak on April 26 I guess is because of a lot of StumbleUpon traffic that day.

Labels: about2findout.com, news

About2findout.com is over 800 questions big now. Number 800 is part of the 'Yet another science quiz'. There are over 200 people and 70 quizzes now.

Thanks to all the people who contributed questions and quizzes so far, and please keep 'em coming.

Labels: about2findout.com, science

Last night I added a quiz on one of the most popular things around: the iPhone. I don't own one, but I played with it when I was in the US last year. One day I hope to find the time to write a mobile version of the about2findout.com site, that you can view on the iPhone or other mobile devices. One day...

Labels: about2findout.com, apple, iphone, quiz

So how did the site do in the last month? As always, an update on the latest numbers, brought to you by the free Google Analytics service.


- The site visits went up again to 3776 visits, for 7.85 pages per visit on average. That makes almost 30.000 page views. 83% are new visits.
- The top day was 25 March with 373 visits. That day the site was listed on the Museum of Modern Beta blog.
- Top 5 countries are United States, India, Italy, United Kingdom and Belgium.
- Most popular quiz was the one on Confusing Words.
- 15 new quizzes, 84 new members and 139 new questions were added to the site.
- 59% internet explorer, 38% firefox

So March was a good month, but I wished I found some more time to bring you new features. April looks busy too, but I'll do my best.

Labels: about2findout.com

I'm very happy to see that the site gets listed in web 2.0 directories, and gets reviews. Here are some of last week (BTW, in case you are wondering, Technorati is my spy).

Got listed on a German site:
http://www.web2null.de/about2findout

And on this one:
http://diystartupnews.com/2008/03/25/about2findout-beta/
Like the comment 'the pub quiz without the pub'.

And on Techie-buzz they say:
About2FindOut is a site which quizzes you on various topics, it allows community members to answer quizzes as well as solve it. So if you are a avid solver of quizzes head there and solve quizzes or create some cool ones and share them with others.

There is an article and review on socialtake.com that I like to quote from:
"Why it might be a killer - This trivia site will agree with thinking minds all over the world. The quizzes actually make you think, unlike other game sites out there. Plus, you’ll get to compete against other people, make challenges, and find out if you’re really the fab brain you think you are." Indeed, I do hope people learn some things (also about themselves) when they are on the site. They also end with a very pertinent question "Are questions vetted in any way? How accurate are the answers?". I might need to work further on that one, but for the moment people can send a message to the author and administrators with the link 'I think it is wrong.' The author can then reply or change his question. Administrators can also edit all questions. So far this has worked well, and on the 700 question I guess about 10 have been corrected so far.

Finally an article on two Italian sites (that I can't read unfortunately):
- http://blog.atuttonet.it/applicazioni-web/about2findout-crea-i-tuoi-quiz.php
- Geekissimo

Labels: about2findout.com, blogrol

The site got listed on March 25 on the Museum of Modern Beta blog. Saurier Duval maintains this list of web 2.0 sites that are typically in perpetual beta.

And speaking of the Museum of Modern Beta, here are some entries related to learning 2.0:

Schoolfinder

SchoolFinder places K-12 school information at your fingertips, enabling you to search and compare public, private, charter and online schools

Edmodo.com
The free communication platform for education.
As discussed on : http://www.somewhatfrank.com/2008/03/edmodo-microblo.html

Learn it lists
learn a little every day

Labels: about2findout.com, MoMB, museum of modern beta

Two days ago, I was on easter holiday spending a few days in the youth hostel on the Dutch island of Texel. It was snowing (yes, indeed, at Easter of all times!) and it's a little island so I bought a 5 euro hour on the Internet to make a new quiz on my site. Oh horror: I could not login. Only when I cleared the 'remember me' box on the login page, I could access the site. That has probably something to do with persistent cookies or other food, but then it hit me: so that is the reason why so many new users on the site don't fill in their profile page or have a 0 score! All people on Internet kiosks in Internet cafes probably have problems logging in. So I changed the behavior: the 'remember me' box is now by default unchecked. It will help everybody to log in. But for people returning to the site, they'll have to provide their userid and password again, except when they check the box.

Labels: about2findout.com, cookie, login, remember me

I made 5 video tutorials and put them in the help section of the site. At the same time I adapted the help section to look like the rest with a navigation box on the right. The screen capture videos are made with a free copy of the previous version of Camtasia that you can get from TechSmith. Camtasia is market leader in their segment, and it shows. It was very easy to make the captures, and to convert them to AVI, flash or WMV video. For the links below you need the Windows Media Player.

Video 1 : How to solve questions and quizzes on about2findout.com?
Video 2 : How to create questions on about2findout.com?
Video 3 : Hints on creating questions, and all question types
Video 4 : How to create a 7of9 quiz on about2findout.com?
Video 5 : How to add a contact?

I have also uploaded these videos on YouTube. For some reason, only 2 out of the 5 wmv files converted on YouTube. I redid the others as AVI files and that worked.

See all videos on http://www.youtube.com/decouteb

Labels: about2findout.com, camtasia, tutorials, video, youtube

It's not easy (for me at least) to design a web site that looks good and looks the same on all browsers. I test it out on IE and Firefox, and that's it. But you don't need to have a machine installed with 20 exotic browsers such as Flock or Epiphany or others. Go to browsershots.org and type in the URL of your site. You will be put in a queue and after some time (30 minutes for me) you'll get little screenshots of your site as seen by 44 different browsers.

About2findout.com renders pretty much the same on browsers, but on Konqueror and Flock 1.1 it doesn't show for some reason. Oh well.

Have a look:
http://browsershots.org/http://www.about2findout.com/

Labels: about2findout.com, browsers, browsershots.org

About2findout.com is not intended to run on mobile phones (at this point in time at least). And there is a site you can use to measure exactly how bad your web site runs on a mobile phone, or how much it would cost for someone to download it to their phones. It's scary. But you also get advise on how to make it work better on mobiles. The site is called ready.mobi, and please, don't go to about2findout.com on your mobile, unless it is an iPhone with full browser capability. On iPhones it works well, I've seen.

http://ready.mobi/results.jsp?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.about2findout.com&locale=en_EN

Labels: about2findout.com, mobile, ready.mobi

A somewhat longer than usual February has just passed, so it is time to have another look at what happened to the site last month.

I did not have much time in February to work on the site and that shows: only the challenge has been added from a functional point of view. But we did have a steady increase of visitors that subscribe and come back, usually to make the Friday Quizday quiz.

The 'natural' number of visits is currently around 30 per day. For 6 days I paid 5 euro a day for Google Advertisement and that got the site up to around 100 visitors per day. The Confusing Words Quiz was the most popular click-through.

One more important fact: after having Google ads (via Google Adsense) on my blog for over a year and on the site since December, I finally got a 76.30 euro payment from Google! I actually spend more on paying them ads for my site, but who's complaining, it's a good evolution. By the end of the year I hope advertisement will cover the hosting fees of the site.

Labels: about2findout.com

Last night the 600th question was added to the site. The recent 5-day Google Ads campaign also had a good effect: 100 visitors a day, and 13 new members. Tho most clicked add was the one for the 'Confusing Words' quiz, made by dailydog.
Here are the latest quiz and question 600 (in Dutch).

Labels: about2findout.com, cats, claus

You can challenge one of your contacts or anyone else on the site now. Here is how it works:

After you answer any question, click the link 'Challenge a friend' in the navigation box on the right.

A new screen opens, where you can select who to challenge. When you position the mouse over the 'send a challenge to' link, all your contacts are shown, and you can select one. You can also type in the user name of anyone on the site.

Next select for how many points (2-5) you bet that the other person won't know the question, type in an optional message, and hit the 'send' button. An e-mail and an internal message are sent out, and the challenged person has 7 days to accept or reject your challenge. If he or she answers the question right, you lose the points to him, otherwise you get the points from him.

Let the duels begin!

Labels: about2findout.com, challenges, new

I spent (wasted?) all day figuring out how to make people select and upload an avatar or profile picture to their account on the site. But here it is, from today onwards you will find a link in the edit profile page to upload an avatar. That should give a face to the people solving and creating questions and quizzes.

Asp.net (the programming language I use) only offers some file upload control, but I wanted something were users could crop the image their uploaded so the resulting avatar would always be 50 by 50 pixels. There is a great and expensive control available that does that (I-Load from Radactive) but I'm not going to spend 250$ on my free site. So I found a control named WebImageMaker. It was made by Tom Crane and does exactly what I wanted: upload an image, and select a part of it. I changed the control just a little bit so I could translate error messages and buttons in multiple languages.

The upload limit is 4 MB, and that is a default in asp.net. I did not see any reason to change that. Maybe one of these weeks you'll be able to upload images with questions, as I've figured out the basics.

Labels: about2findout.com, asp.net, avatars, new

I will start reviewing other quiz sites in this blog. I'll compare them to what I'm doing with about2findout.com, share my impression, get some inspiration, and each time donate and steal one question or quiz (bring on the lawsuits!).






I'm starting with the biggest of them all: funtrivia.com. By far, it is the largest and most popular trivia site and it dates back to the nineties. It has 1.900.000 members (!), and over 91.000 quizzes with in total 1.700.000 questions. Wow, that's big. At first impression: big and ugly site, but let's not jump ahead. Similar to about2findout.com the site is all about solving and submitting trivia questions and quizzes, and scoring points and get high in the rankings. But the underlying philosophy of the two sites is completely different.

Funtrivia is a typical web 1.0 site, where the design of about2findout.com goes for 2.0 elements where ever possible.. Funtrivia.com works with categories, not tags. It has forums. It works with a small group of editors who review submissions (and reject up to 2/3th) and control the quality of the site. And like all sites of that time, it suffers from severe ugliness and complexity. The complexity is probably a direct result its size and its development over time to keep people interested. It took me a while to figure out the difference between quizzes and games. Also the point system is scary at first sight. You easily get lost in the system. As for the look and feel, well, I'll try to give it a positive spin: vintage looks are hot. So this site would look great in a web museum. You know, the time sites had Times New Roman fonts. And oh my god, all that clip art. All that clip art! And what do all the icons mean? It's a good thing looks aren't everything. (I'm not saying that about2findout.com is beautiful and as simple as it can get, but at least over the last few months it has gotten better in both areas :).

The sign up procedure is easy and works with e-mail validation. But why are children under 13 not allowed? You get a few e-mails from them and can subscribe to a daily mailing list. (I also just launched one: the Friday Quizday mailing.) Once you are a member your points are kept, you can participate in the internal mailing system, etc. As a direct result of the size of funtrivia.com, you are compared within an assigned 'class', that is roughly the 5000 people who signed up at about the same time as you, so comparison makes sense. The language of the site is English.

You can search for quizzes in a certain category and questions are either multiple choice, fill in the blank or true/false. I find it strange that you have to type in 'TRUE' or 'FALSE' instead of selecting it, but it is probably good exercise for you finger muscles. You can get questions via HTML forms or via Flash. With the Flash player you get immediate feedback, with the HTML form you need to submit everything first. They also have daily and hourly quiz games that reset automatically. The global challenge is a nice initiative: it runs over a couple of months and is really for quiz die-hards. I haven't found any multi player games but maybe I didn't find them. As said: it's a complex site and patience is not a virtue I have. You can get points and badges. For example I have been on the site for two days now and made about 20 quizzes. Now I have a first level badge and this is my score and ranking:
"Your score of 1680 points ranks you as #286,574 of 777,506 ranking quiz players worldwide." Not bad after just 2 days. I conclude that a couple of 100.000 quiz players made an account once and never came back. But that is something I know as well.

The business model of funtrivia.com is in part advertisement, in part premium membership and in part selling quizzes. There is limited advertisement, it doesn't bother at all. The mainly rely on the gold membership they try to sell you for 20$ per 6 months. As a gold member you get extra things, such as access to special tournaments and advanced statistics but also some stuff that I find quite basic such as the ability to upload an avatar, visual indications of what quizzes you have already done or unlimited score tracking (for regular members only 300 quizzes are stored). I have no idea if they are as successful as Flickr in selling premium memberships. They also sell trivia questions for use in your own quiz evenings.
About2findout.com on the other hand is just starting up and changes almost every day. It is still searching for a way to get sustainable income to cover the hosting fees. The plan is to do it via the Google Adsense on the question page. So far I haven't seen a Google dollar yet, but we are hopeful.

Some other random things I like about the site: the notions of teams (for example I'm part of the Belgian quizzes group), the fact that they suggest similar quizzes based on the one you did, the whole concept of tournaments spread over days or weeks to make sure people keep playing and come back. Some things other than the complex and ugly nature I don't like: I can't upload a quiz yet. I was ready to donate the Christmas or HIV quiz, but you need to be a member over one month and have done 100 quizzes before you are even allowed to submit a quiz that will then be rejected or accepted by the editors. I guess I'll have to keep going back to funtrivia for a month and keep you informed of the authoring capabilities in one month from now...

In summary: funtrivia.com is the biggest of its kind, and that is mainly due to its size (many people, many questions) which attracts newcomers and due to the quality of its questions database. But it is big and ugly and complex and partly free, partly paying. Above all, it is a typical web 1.0 site.
In comparison to about2findout.com, I must say they had to deal with a lot of things I don't need to because I have a limited amount of players and questions. The philosophy of the sites are different: I rely on the 'wisdom of the crowds' to guard the quality of the trivia, not on editors and all kinds of rules. But funtrivia does have something that I should introduce one of these months: a purpose. You can play tournaments etc, in about2findout.com you can only do a question and a quiz. It will improve once I get around programming the challenge, where you can bet points with your friends, but still, I need some reasons for people to come back to the site more often.

Labels: about2findout.com, funtrivia.com, quiz, trivia