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To all our users, thank you for your quick feedback about our new idle mode. I wanted to take a brief moment to discuss a little bit about why we created this feature, a workaround for those that don’t want it, and what our commitment is to you and all our users.
ReplyDeleteThe real-time Web is a balancing act. Everyone remembers Twitter’s early days with frequent service interruptions. Speed often comes at an expense, obviously, in server costs, but also in terms of reliability. In the not too distant past, traditional websites only had to serve one page per pageview. Today, real-time Web services and live updates can mean continually serving hundreds or thousands of updates for each pageview.
Our challenge:What makes Netvibes so great is that we ping all your feeds and services for updates minute by minute, so you can see a live river of content. We aggregate multiple real-time Web services, from Twitter to Facebook, and more than 1,000,000 different newsfeeds – all constantly updated automatically for our users. This represents about 10,000,000 new items to collect, every day.
Our solution: idle mode. We wanted to create a solution that would be transparent (so our users are aware) and invisible (so as not to cause annoyance). In our first iteration last week, idle mode would kick in after 20 min of inactivity and required users to click to reconnect. Thanks to your feedback, we quickly realized that this was interrupting the user experience – we heard ya!
Our dev team immediately worked around the clock to make it more unobtrusive. Now users can restore their session simply by moving their mouse. Moreover, we continue to count and update your feeds in the background–you can still see the number of new articles climb, even when in idle mode.
This is a critical issue of fairness for all users. Without idle mode, our inactive or “away” users would inadvertently slow down the network for active users. We feel this is the best and fairest solution for maintaining speed and reliability all our users.
Why did Netvibes implement idle mode?
Speed. Less load means greater speed and reliability for users that are active. By implementing idle mode for users that are inactive for 20 min or more, we can save nearly 2/3 of our server load – which means more resources are liberated for our active users.
Sustainability. Less load means fewer watts being burned by our servers.
Economics. We are committed to keeping Netvibes.com free and ad free. We do this in by generating revenue from our business Dashboard Intelligence products. And we do this by being efficient with our bandwidth and distributing it fairly to active users who need it most. ......../-