YouTwins - the blog

2007-11-05T11:06:00.000Z

Well, it's over a month since my last post so regular readers (a man can dream, can't he?) will have been wondering what's up.

YouTwins is going from strength to strength with thousands of users and over 700 twins already matched in the first three months of its existence.

I have recently been focusing on facebook as the site to promote awareness of YouTwins. It seems more successful then earlier experiences with sites like orkut and livejournal. I have now set up a facebook group HERE for people with twins so they can give feedback about their experiences.

So, I think I'll keep focusing on facebook for promoting and getting feedback on YouTwins. Don't expect much more in this blog. Check out my YouTwins facebook group instead.

YouTwins has triplets

2007-09-24T22:57:00.000+01:00

Another milestone in the early history of YouTwins.com - our first triplets! Three people with the same birthdate who can now email each other and compare their lives and personalities.

Catching users who don't complete registration

2007-09-23T14:11:00.001+01:00

I imagine this is a common problem with websites that required users to create some form of account, but I have noticed that almost 10% of users who enter an email address and birthdate never complete their registration by responding to the email that is sent to them.

Of course there are bound to be some who put in joke details and never intend to follow it through but I suspect in many cases that the emails from YouTwins are being treated as spam by the recipients' ISPs or email programs, so they never receive them. My website sends reminders but of course these are also likely to be blocked by over-agressive spam filters.

There must be others have experience of dealing with this but I haven't been able to find useful advice.

Increasing numbers of twins

2007-09-19T20:45:00.000+01:00

Less than two months after I launched YouTwins.com more than one of eight of those who have signed up have been put in touch with 'twins', born on the exact same month, day and year as them! Not bad considering there are thousands of possible birthdates.

If you are aged between 16 and 30 your chances are even higher than that but don't be put off ewhatever your age - new twins are being put in contact every day.

YouTwins gets a review, but no link

2007-09-18T20:21:00.000+01:00

Synthesis has published a review of YouTwins which is a good review except that there's no link to the YouTwins web site. Well thanks David but if you read this perhaps you could add a link!

Accessing YouTwins as a facebook application

2007-09-11T23:15:00.000+01:00

Exploring facebook with the intention of using it to spread awarenes of YouTwins has of course resulted in me wasting many hours on facebook completing quizzes and playing games.

But, all these facebook applications got me thinking. facebook users might not be sufficiently interested to visit my website but if I could develop a facebook application that would pass their name and email address to YouTwins and automatically sign them up and check if they had twins, then that would be much more likely to catch on.

So, that lead me to looking through lots of developer resources. BUT I just discovered that my plan is fatally flawed. Not surprisingly now that I think about it, facebook applications can't access a user's email address. Facebook only reveals the same data to applications that is revealed to other users or friends.

Back to the drawing board. Or perhaps there's just time for another quick movie quiz...

Word is spreading and the odds are improving

2007-09-09T14:17:00.000+01:00

It's great to see that word about YouTwins is spreading and that people seem very positive about it. As well as the Finnish contingent that I commented on previously, thanks to Deana in Texas who is helping keep up the momentum.

The odds of a new user being matched with a twin immediately are now improved to 1 in 10 so why not give it a try?

And thanks to puolivilla I now know that kaksoisveli is Finnish for twin brother and kaksoset means twins. Who siad te internet isn't educational?

Twins are big in Finland

2007-09-06T20:55:00.001+01:00

I keep tabs using statcounter on where most of the visitors to YouTwins are coming from. For several weeks the top countries have been USA, Canada, India and UK. The order has varied although the US has consistently been top. Then yesterday Finland entered the list! A country with a relatively small population where English isn't the first language. You are all very welcome!

I don't ask people who sign up with YouTwins where they are from so I can't tell which visitors do sign up but statcounter does in most cases rather usefully tell me what link they clicked on to get to YouTwins. Checking this I realised most came through a social networking / blog site livejournal.com. On it are several posts with links to YouTwins all written (not unreasonably) in Finnish.

I can figure out the jist of most Western European languages but Finnish is something else entirely! So I am completely in the dark as to what the posts say. Hopefully they say nice things about YouTwins? I'm hazarding a guess that kaksoisveli means twins? Google's translation engine doesn't stretch to Finnish. I'll figure it out somehow.

wasting time on facebook

2007-09-04T18:56:00.000+01:00

I have become distracted by facebook. Having signed up mainly to see how I might make use of it to spread the word about YouTwins.com I have spent more time than I should trying to figure out how to use it and browsing around.

For someone used to structured communication and where everything has a defined purpose, facebook is quite unsettling. How do I know what happens when I 'poke' someone or 'write on their wall'. When do I send a meesage or post a message or start a discussion? They all seem pretty similar but slightly different. I think there should be a 'learner driver' icon you can put next to your name for a while in case you inadvertently breach facebook etiquette (if such a thing exists).

So, if the blog goes silent for a while you'll know where I am to be found.

Making it easier for new users to sign up

2007-09-01T10:52:00.000+01:00

Having written a couple of days ago about my priorities for YouTwins I have already gone against what I had decided and made a functional improvement.

A small proportion of users were signing up but never logging in to validate their email address. I have now made this simpler, allowing the user just to click on a link in the email and get logged in for the first time automatically. Hopefully this will reduce the incidence of users signing up and never bothering to validate.

I've been poking people and writing on their walls

2007-08-31T21:54:00.001+01:00

It's no wonder people are less polite these days. It used to be you could get arrested for such activities but now facebook is encouraging you to poke other people and write on their walls.

I was encouraged by a (younger) family member to sign up to facebook and see if it would hep spread the word about YouTwins. I have done this but I have to say I am finding facebook very unintuitive. I have invited a random selection of my contacts to be my friends (sorry to you if you were invited by mistake!) and haven't yet figured out how to do what and what the etiquette is.

Still, it's interesting enough to persevere and hopefully people will forgive my early mistakes.

Unreliable hosting

2007-08-31T21:47:00.000+01:00

My website was having problems for almost 24 hours yesterday and earlier today. Apologies to you if you were affected and unable to sign up to YouTwins but it is fixed now.

I noticed yesterday that I was getting strange error messages and logged a support call with the hosting company. Checking the messages on Google suggested that the problem was a full disc on the server. I would have thought the hosting company would have had monitoring software to detect these things before they became critical but evidently not.

Anyhow it is now fixed but took about 20 hours. I guess I can't complain too much becuase I am not paying much for the website hosting. It makes me wonder whether I should pay more and expect better reliability?

So much to do. So little time.

2007-08-28T18:44:00.000+01:00

YouTwins.com is a hobby. There's only me doing it all plus I have a full-time job. I spend lots of my spare time working on it when I perhaps ought to be doing jobs around the house or garden.

My point is that it is necessary for me to prioritise what I do. The list of stuff I would like to do simply cannot be fitted in. If I thought many people were reading this blog I might ask for feedback on what is most important but I know that few of you are reading it so far, so I'll make my own mind up (but all feedback is still very welcome).

The options are:

ensuring the site continues to work well as the numbers of users grows
making the site look more professional
making the site easier to use
adding new features
publicising the site

I have decided my priorities need to be 1 and then 5. If it doesn't work then there's no chance that new user numbers wil grow through word of mouth recommendations. And if user numbers don't continue to grow then few people will find twins so I must publicise it. All the rest is nice to have, but not essential.

Of course in an ideal world YouTwins users would be doing the publicity more effectively than I can (because there's only one of me) by telling their friends what a great idea it is, and that would leave me time to improve the site itself. But until then I'll carry on publicising it on social networking sites and consider how I might get some media coverage

Who's signing up at YouTwins?

2007-08-26T17:09:00.000+01:00

From having the idea for YouTwins.com early in July I opened the site for business on 1 August so it has now been going for about three and a half weeks.

So, who is it appealing to so far? A broad range of ages but mostly 15 - 30 year-olds. No real surprise there I guess, particularly as the limited work I have been doing to promote my site has been in social networking sites such as myspace and facebook.

There are several hundred people signed up and about 1 in 12 has been lucky and matched with a twin so far. That proportion is growing as more sign up and it is very early days.

YouTwins.com - Genesis

2007-08-26T16:12:00.000+01:00

In the beginning was the challenge. I wanted to create a website that would attract large numbers of visitors. I had no idea at that stage what the site would be about - that came later.

I will be using this blog to tell the story of how YouTwins.com came about. As well as catching up to date with the history I will also talk about how I am promoting it and my ideas for developing it further.

Ideally I would like also to use this blog to get feedback from you. What do you think of the idea. What should I be doing next?

The idea came to me when travelling to Austria on holiday in July this year. Wouldn't it be great to be able to get in contact with other people born on the exact same birthdate and find out what we had in common? Without the internet this would be difficult. With the internet it is easy. So - that was the Genesis moment (or do I mean the Eureka moment?).