velospace blog

velospace tweets out an awesome bike every weekday (and usually a few extra on the weekends). We’ve been keeping up with our promise back in October of 2009 to share bikes with anyone who wants to follow-on. To date we’ve featured 77 bikes (which only leaves 14,267 to go).

You’ll notice that all featured bikes now have a “Featured Bike!” badge near the top of their bike page.

We picked these bikes because we think they are awesome and because they make us smile. Send us your suggestions for bikes on twitter (@velospace) and we’ll get you sorted out. Ride on!

- Greg

velospace has grown by leaps and bounds over the past four years. As traffic and content have both grown, so too has the stress on the hosting infrastructure. One of the ways to speed up the site is to tweak and rewrite intensive database queries. Another way is to tune the Apache server configuration.

Beginning Today mod_deflate Is Active, Saving An Average Of 75% Load Times On Non-Rich Content

mod_deflate is an Apache tool that compresses all non-rich (i.e. non-image) content on the server before it is sent to the visitor. Put another way, using mod_deflate the server zips all of the non-image content, sends it over to the user, who then unzips it on their end. The result is a lot less bandwidth being used because it is all packaged into a compressed file. Today I took the plunge and implemented mod_deflate on velospace after following (and modifying) a MediaTemple guide.

The efficiencies gained by implementing this new tool are enormous: for example, the velospace homepage has 26.52 kb of compressable content on it. mod_deflate shrinks that down to 7.43 kb in transit – savings of 71.98% per request! Considering the hundreds of thousands of page views a month, each of which will have similar bandwidth savings, the benefit of running mod_deflate is clear.

Another example is the velospace bicycling forums homepage which clocks in at a heavy 45.84 kb without compression. mod_deflate compresses that down to 5.55 kb now in transit – saving 87.89% of the bandwidth it would have taken yesterday.

The bottom line is that tools like mod_deflate help keep busy websites like velospace up and running in the face of constant traffic. If you have any questions or suggestions about keeping velospace running smoothly feel free to drop me an e-mail.

- Greg

velospace is a thriving social network. Bikers contribute to a steady stream of photos, sales, comments, and private discussions. The value of velospace, like any social networking site, comes from the content generated by its users. Because the site relies on user contributed content, the tools for adding content must be easy to use. We have a simple user registration forum, easy to use uploading and comment tools, a flexible private messaging system, and so on. Erecting barriers to user participation would result in less content being added and ultimately result in a less valuable site.

Balancing simple participation and spam is tough.

Encouraging users to contribute as much as possible is important, but the tools which let legitimate users engage one another also gives spammers an easy route to post their crap. There is a tension between ease of use for users and controlling the constant flow of crap that spam bots put out there.

velospace uses a couple of less-than-obvious tools to control spam that you may be interested in:

1. Each link posted to any public part of the site is treated with rel=nofollow. nofollow nullifies any value a spammer tries to get by slipping links onto velospace in hopes that their page will show up higher on search engine result pages. Drupal modules and Vanilla plugins have completely automated this process, requiring no human intervention (thankfully!).
2. Every bit of content with a link included is reported and reviewed. Database queries allow us to quickly review content that contains links, and spam users are deleted when they post crap almost immediately. This is a time intensive job, but the result is important enough to make it worth out time.
3. Moderation tools are very important and have been in place and used since March of 2008. As we said back then:
   

   This tool gives users a direct say in the quality of the content on the site – if someone tries to lower the value of velospace by spamming the site, posting derogatory comments, or otherwise being a jerk – the community can raise its voice and be heard.

We are always looking for new ideas when it comes to spam control. If you have any ideas please send us a feedback note.

- Greg

Today marks a step forward for the velospace Used Bike Marketplace: anyone wanting to buy a certain bike part or looking for a particular bike part can now post their requests in the Used Bike Want To Buy / Looking For Marketplace.

Previously all want to buy requests were posted on the velospace forums in a bloated thread that was hard to track and keep up with. The new system uses the same technology as the existing Used Bike For Sale/For Trade Marketplace and is much easier to navigate and manage. This new feature should cut down on erroneous forum posts and keep relevant content contained to the right part of the site.

Also new is a four-tab navigation system for the Marketplace: Browse For Sale Listings / Browse Want To Buy Listings / Post For Sale Listing / Post Want To Buy Listing. Each of these tabs clearly directs users to the right place, no more confusion about where to look or post!

If you have any suggestions or questions feel free to contact me.

- Greg

velospace turned four years old this past month and things are looking great: velospace is the best online social network for bicyclists thanks to your help. When velospace turned two and three years old the future was bright, but these days things are even better.

The past year saw many incremental changes, tweaks and fixes to the site. In addition to making velospace run smoother than ever before we sponsored two amazing not-for-profit programs that use bicycles to do good: the Illini 4000 Ride for the Cure and Charlie’s Freewheels Project. More recently the velospace twitter feed has been buffed up to serve amazing bikes from the archives every weekday.

2009 was an amazing year for velospace and 2010 is shaping up to be better. New features, more content, merchandise and bug fixes are all in the works.

- Greg

If you follow the velospace Twitter feed you’ll see that we are tweeting out one amazing bike a day from the extensive velospace archives. There are nearly four years worth of some of the most interesting and jaw dropping bikes ever created and we are proud to share them with you.

A fresh bike will be posted every day Monday through Friday on the feed – if velospace stopped accepting bikes today we tweet out about 67 years worth of bikes at this rate!

Follow velospace on Twitter and get more bikes in your life.

- Greg

If you’ve used velospace lately you’ve probably noticed some slowness, downtime, and generally crappy service. Sorry.

The trials and tribulations of velospace’s growth and impact on server architecture is documented in this blog and on the status updates twitter feed.

velospace was running on a MediaTemple Dedicated Virtual Base with upgrades for a total of 768mb of RAM.

velospace is now running on a MT DV Extreme with 2gb of RAM.

The problem with the old setup was that the virtualization software, Virtuozzo, has hard coded memory limits for processes. When velospace usage resulted in high load and memory use (e.g. when the site got a spike in traffic) Virtuozzo would hit its memory limit (kmemsize), shut down the Apache process for 5 minutes and then reestablish the process. MediaTemple doesn’t have Virtuozzo set up to allocate additional memory (in a burst-type configuration) when necessary – the software just kills processes.

The new server setup should take care of things for a while. In addition to more than double the amount of RAM the DV Extreme also has more CPU cycles allocated which should keep the site smoother under heavy load.

If you have any questions drop me a line.

- Greg

velospace is extraordinarily proud of its members, and whenever one of us goes down we all feel your pain.

One of the first velospace users, Shiznaz, a/k/a/ Charlie Prinsep was killed by a drunk driver in August of 2007 while riding his bike in Canada. Some of Charlie’s friends and family have worked hard over the past two years to set up a not-for-profit group to spread Charlie’s love of bicycles: the Charles Prinsep Initiative.

In Charlie’s memory the group has launched a program to help youth from the Regent Park area of Toronto earn bicycles by participating in a build-a-bike summer workshop program. The program is called Charlie’s Freewheels. The pilot program has gone very well and the group is looking for volunteers and donations to help it grow.

velospace proudly sponsors the Charles Prinsep Initiative along with their pilot program Charlie’s Freewheels. Please consider donating if you have the means – this is a great cause in the name of one of the founding members of the velospace community.

From the CPI website:

In life, Charles held a steadfast belief that an individual’s actions could make a difference. He cared about the environment, and continually sought to find ways to reduce his own environmental impact. Charles was also passionate about cities, constantly envisioning simple and practical ways in which the urban culture he so appreciated could become more environmentally responsible. Charles was also a deeply creative person; for him, art was everywhere and in everything. Cycling was a medium that connected so many of his interests; bicycles offered him an environmentally sustainable transportation alternative through which he could explore the urban environment, and were also works of art in themselves. We invite you to get to know Charlie. Visit his blog: The Double Cross.

- Greg

velospace had a bought of unavailability the past few days. The Drupal database has been periodically corrupting itself, resulting in permissions based issues. The symptom is that users see white pages on the site and can’t access the Drupal versions of velospace, but can still access the forums (which are run on Vanilla software).

The fix is convoluted but follows these steps, posted here for posterity:

Step 1: reestablish baseline permissions in the corrupted tables
INSERT INTO users (uid, name, mail) VALUES ('0', '', '');
INSERT INTO users_roles (uid, rid) VALUES (0, 1);
INSERT INTO node_access VALUES (0, 0, 'all', 1, 0, 0);


Step 2: empty the cache and sessions tables

Step 3: clear out anonymous access rights in /admin/access

Step 4: reestablish anonymous access rights in /admin/access

Thanks for your patience – looks like we are back in business.

- Greg

Since February of 2009 I have made an effort to update velospace, the places for bikes on a semi-regular basis, and to let you know about it. Update #1, #2, #3, and today we have #4.

In addition to the small site updates, 2009 has brought quite a few anti-spam measures, including: a 60 second comment delay, 15-day wait period for new users to post sales, and a one forum thread per day per user limit.

In continuing the effort to update the site, I have a few small changes to let you know about:

• The “for sale” button at the top of the site has been replaced by a “buy / sell” button that links you to either the used bike marketplace to browse items for sale or the used bike parts want to buy thread on the forums. Thanks to user eaglerock for the excellent suggestion.
• The “thumbnails” button at the top of the site has been renamed “photos” to be a bit more clear about what you are getting when you go there. The bike thumbnail photos page itself now has browse by category links at the top so you can easily drill down into your favorite type of bike.

- Greg

Some more recent small updates to velospace that you may be interested in:

• velospace bicycling forum users can create one new thread per day. This was put in place to prevent trolls from spamming like mad, you can make as many comments as you like.
• added velospace tweet tracker to the front page. If you are on twitter, follow-us and include “velospace” in your tweets to show up on the tracker.

As always, I am always open to suggestions for features, bug fixes, and tweaks to the site. Drop a note on the forums or send me some direct feedback.

- Greg

On suggestion from the velospace bicycle community I added another anti-spam measure tonight:

New users must wait 15 days before posting sales.

15 days may seem like a long time, but with nearly 25,000 members velospace has grown leaps and bounds over the past few years. In order to cut down on spammers and scammers the quarantine on posting sales should cut back on fraudulent posts in the velospace used bike marketplace.

This measure, combined with the 60 second comment delay put in place in April 2009 are both useful tools in the fight against the barbarians at the gate. Next up is throttling user account creation by the same IP. Some spammers will create 15-20 accounts in a row with spam URLs in the profiles to try and get some extra Google juice. What they haven’t recognized is that all the URLs are nofollow so the links are meaningless… but tell that to an automated spambot and you don’t get much in return!

If you have any suggestions, as always, please contact me.

- Greg

Based mostly on excellent suggestions from the velospace bicycling community, I put in a few hours tonight and updated a few things:

• added reload button to bottom of Thumbnails page
• 50% more space in bike text fields
• reduced vertical spacing on site by moving search box up and crunching space between menu and main content pane
• the list of forum discussions started are now properly sorted on user profiles, see e.g. Greg’s profile
• the velospace home page includes the 5 most recent velospace related tweets

If you have any suggestions please add them to the feature wish list thread.

- Greg

velospace is sponsoring a great cause this summer and so should you: the Illini 4000 for Cancer.

The Illini 4000 for Cancer is a bike ride across America to raise money and awareness of cancer issues and cancer’s effects on our lives. Every summer a group of University of Illinois students band together and ride their bikes for 4,000 miles from coast-to-coast in support of this cause through many towns and cities.

The Illini 4000’s mission:

While riding across the country, the Illini 4000 Bike America Team interviews cancer patients and survivors from all walks of life. We believe that everyone has a story to tell; from the truck driver in New York City to the Wheat farmer in Colorado, everyone has a story tell. The purpose of this project is to illustrate cancer’s influence on American life, and how individuals respond to cancer according to their religious beliefs, location and socioeconomic status. Since 2007, the Illini 4000 riders have recorded the stories of over 30 cancer patients and survivors.

Interested in helping? Pitch in one of three ways:
1. Donate money
2. Host the riders when they are in your town
3. Sponsor the ride

velospace and the Illini 4000 will be working together this summer to support this great cause. Riders will be chiming in on velospace as the ride progresses give us updates and take part in the velospace community.

Continue this discussion on the velospace forums

- Greg

For the past month velospace’s RSS and tag system was down for the count. I spent hours and hours trying to track down the problem and tonight I finally figured out the problem: an obscure PHP issue was causing headaches on the site’s back end.

Now RSS feeds and tags are back! Go forth and enjoy the good things in life like the Fixed gear, Single speed, Track bike page (and feed).

- Greg

velospace now has some additional anti-spam measures. The past 24 hours has featured two rounds of scripted prescription spam bots. Each time the bot created a new account, added 250+ spam comments in about a minute, and then left town.

To combat this type of drive-by spamming I added a 60 second delay between comment posts. There are lots of other tools like this in use on the site, and I may roll this out to other types of content, or increase the time period, if spam continues to be a problem.

Any questions or ideas, drop me a note.

- Greg

Every so often I sit down and try to either fix a problem on velospace or code up another feature. When putting new features together it usually takes a few hours to design, code, troubleshoot, and launch. During the coding process php.net ends up being one of the most common resources I turn to.

A few gems from the PHP manual that have saved me a whole lot of time and headaches:

• strip_tags() – easily remove HTML from user strings put on display
• strtotime() – simply convert a plain English time and date – like June 30, 2001 – into a Unix timestamp. This function is incredibly useful for standardizing and sharing timestamps between Drupal, which uses Unix timestamps, and Vanilla, which uses plain English timestamps.
• db_fetch_object() – grab a database result as a PHP object for easy references, e.g. $forSale->price, $forSale->title, and $forSale->description. Objects make grabbing and displaying data from a database infinitely easier.

PHP is nearly 15 years old and there are very few problems people haven’t already solved using it. Its a great tool to have because the implementation is simple and relatively straight forward.

- Greg

Since the velospace bike discussion forums went live three months ago I’ve been thinking of how to integrate them into the rest of the site.

Over the past few days the following changes have been made to work forum content into the rest of the site:

• Addition of a “Forums” block to the home page to track the most active forum discussions.
• Addition of “time ago” info to most content listed on the front page and user profiles. (thank you strtotime()!)
• Upgrade of user profiles to include blocks for the user’s:
  • forum discussions, and
  • forum comments.
• Reformat of the cluster block on user profiles to fit in with new block look and feel.

These are a bunch of small changes that on their own don’t amount to much, but put together they should help connect more disparate parts of the site. The trick is to figure out how to tie in data from Drupal, which runs under the hood of most of velospace, with data from the forum software by Vanilla.

Next I am going to see if the forum has a search API to allow for integration of forum content into bike and cluster pages. As always, if you have any suggestions please let me know.

- Greg

Zazzle tries to get on demand merchandising right, but falls short.

I have written about how to make niche social networking site merchandise work. I have spent countless hours thinking about, designing, printing, scrutinizing, redesigning, returning, packing, shipping, and getting feedback on velospace merchandise. I truly care about the quality of the material that the velospace logo is printed on.

To date I have had multiple designs of t-shirts, hooded sweatshirts, cycling caps, and stickers made. Of those, only the shirts and hoodies have been sold. Why? Not because the designs were bad, but because either the print quality sucked or the garment itself sucked. I recently experimented with Zazzle and found out that they suffer from both of these problems.

I set up a shop on Zazzle, I uploaded my designs, and I placed orders for the merchandise to see how the quality measured up. I decided to try Zazzle because I was approached by them a few months ago about setting up a shop in the Sports / Active Lifestyles section on their site. Zazzle is a on demand merchandise print shop. They print your products after they have been ordered, generally promising a 24 hour turn around. Its a neat concept – rather than having to buy merch in many sizes and hope that people order it, you create a design and let someone else do the logistics of printing and shipping.

After Zazzle reached out to me I had a few conversations with some of their business development guys. During those discussions we talked about what Zazzle could offer, what velospace was looking for, and how we could partner up. In the following months, after a few emails and phone calls to Zazzle, I found out that all the pending deals they had were off. Something internally was going on over there and the velospace / Zazzle partnership was put on hold.

That was about 6 months ago, and just recently I decided to give Zazzle a try as a regular publisher and not as a partner under contract. In early January I ordered a hooded sweatshirt and some stickers from the designs I put together. The hooded sweatshirt was a disaster and the stickers were fine. This post is a write-up of my experience with Zazzle to inform people of what to expect when dealing with them.

Sublimation printing is no good and cheap garments are garbage and not worth your time.

Most merchandise print shops use a screen print method that sprays ink on top of the merchandise. The printed part raises up off the fabric a bit. This type of printing is relatively durable, looks good, produces sharp and crisp edges, and doesn’t require undercoats to print on dark merchandise. For instance, the velospace gray t-shirts with black print did not require a white undercoat to make sure the black was visible.

Sublimation printing, which Zazzle uses, impregnates ink dye directly into the garment. The ink is drawn through and becomes part of the shirt itself. There is no way to separate the print from the merchandise. Because the ink is drawn through, sublimation prints on dark garments need a white undercoat. If you print a logo on a dark garment you will have a white halo around the logo and it will look like trash. This is one of the issues with sublimation printing.

Another issue with sublimation printing is that when the ink is drawn through the fabric it bleeds. Imagine taking a felt tipped pen and letting the tip rest on a shirt. The ink will slowly bleed out and form a soft edge. The same thing occurs with sublimation printing. There are no truly crisp or sharp edges in sublimation printing.

Because of these issues with sublimation printing, I can’t recommend Zazzle. I am disappointed by the quality of the print on the navy blue hooded sweatshirt I ordered from Zazzle. The dark part of the design has a halo around it and as discussed below the garment quality was terrible.

Garment quality is key.

Quality garments are the most important aspect of merchandise after print quality is set. People associate crappy garments with the quality of the brand being promoted. Selling velospace branded merch on poor quality goods reflects poorly on velospace.

Zazzle’s sublimation printing only offer garbage options for hooded sweatshirts. The sample hoodie I ordered is a no-name cheap cotton/polyester Hanes garment. It looks cheap, it feels cheap, and if I were to put it up for sale it would make velospace seem cheap.

As far as I am concerned decent merchandise must at least meet the quality of American Apparel garments at a minimum. They use quality cotton, their stitching is good, and their sizing is consistent. Zazzle sucks because they don’t give you enough quality options as a publisher to print on garments worthy of your designs.

Zazzle is too limiting

Let me count some of the ways that Zazzle arbitrarily limits what you can do as a publisher:

• No sleeve printing.
• Low quality garments. See hooded sweatshirts below.
• No way to limit which specific colors of garment may be ordered for a specific design. You have to choose either light colors (white, gray, pink, light blue, etc.) or dark colors (black, navy blue, dark green, maroon, etc.).
• No white label interface through checkout. You have to link users through to their system for purchase and browsing, including annoying “features” that cannot be turned off (comments, things you may also like, header, footer, etc.).
• No quality hooded sweatshirts for sublimation printing. American Apparel stock is available for embroidery but not for sublimation printing. Why? Who knows but it seems arbitrary to include those garments in one half of the store and not the other.
• Pay-to-convert fee for embroidery files. If you have a logo and you want it embroidered, for example to take advantage of the much better quality American Apparel hooded sweatshirt stock, you have to pay about $30 to have a 3″ x 3″ logo converted into an arbitrary stitch format. You can provide them with a stitch file, but they offer no resources to find a program to convert vector art into stitch files.

What the perfect on demand print shop will offer

• High quality screen printing.
• High quality garments of at least American Apparel quality for all products
• Complete control by publisher over offerings for sale including ability to limit garment sizes and limit colors.
• Complete integration into the publisher’s site end to end from catalog to checkout.
• Competitive pricing with reasonable commissions for the publisher. $15 t-shirts with shipping, $35 hoodies with shipping, $15 cycling caps with shipping, and so on.
• 24 hour turn print and ship around time.
• Fair shipping costs based on actual cost to ship, including multiple shipping options (USPS, FedEx, UPS, etc.).

I am hoping to find an alternative to Zazzle that has these offerings. In the quest for high quality merchandise I am not looking for a quick fix, I really care about the quality of the merch that velospace sells and I need it to be top notch.

If you have any suggestions or comments feel free to contact me.

- Greg

velospace celebrates its three year anniversary this week. Last year we celebrated being two years old, and now we have three notches in our belt!

velospace is the best social network for people who pedal

Thank you to everyone who is a part of our amazing community. Your enthusiasm, creativity, and passion for bicycling is palpable and continues to make velospace the best place for bicyclists to connect online.

Year three was an interesting one

In February we had some downtime, in March we added community moderation, in June we looked at the competition and didn’t see anything worth talking about and we started a status tracker, in October we finally added much requested bike discussion forums, and now in December we CELEBRATE!

velospace’s foundation is strong – new bikes and users stream in, our hosting situation is solid, and the waters look calm for year four. Stay tuned for new merchandise opportunities, a new look, new features, and more reasons to keep coming back.

We love to hear from our users, please drop us a line and share your thoughts.

- Greg

One of the most requested features on velospace over the years has been for an open bike discussion forum. Adding an open forum for velospace users to connect makes a lot of sense, but I resisted the idea for a long time because I know how much time moderating a forum can suck up. I’ve managed to streamline velospace moderation using different tools like community feedback, automated checks, and some good old elbow grease.

At this point adding forums to the mix makes sense: the velospace community is large enough to sustain a vibrant discussion forum and any moderation of the forums can fit into the existing structure that the rest of the site uses.

So without further-ado, I introduce the velospace bicycle discussion forums!

- Greg

The velospace blog has been quiet lately. The action over the past few months has been on the twitter status feed. Things are running smooth and steady with the site. User and bike growth is on pace to hit the goal of 10,000 bikes and 18,000 users by the end of the year (and velospace’s three year anniversary!), some merchandise deals are being considered, and things look good in general.

The used bike marketplace is super busy and may break out into its own entity at some point. I am also working on launching a bicycle advocacy center to encourage people to get more involved in promoting bicycling on a number of different fronts.

If you have any ideas or would like to talk, drop me a line.

- Greg

Technical issues on velospace have cropped up recently, and not so recently, and I realize how frustrating they can be.

velospace now uses Twitter for status updates

Twitter is a simple text update service. It is a valuable tool because it allows users to add content using a variety of inputs: web based control panels, cell phone text messages, and so on.

I am using Twitter for velospace status updates in order to improve communication about technical issues going on with the site. The three most recent messages are displayed on the side column of the blog and you can follow along on Twitter at https://twitter.com/velospace.

If you have any questions or suggestions let me know.

- Greg

velospace upgraded a few days ago to a more powerful server and some issues have popped up with regards to thumbnails and photos not syncing up. The following is a quick two-step process to fix the photos in the mean time while a site-wide solution is worked on.

To fix mismatched thumbnails do the following:

1. Log-in to velospace
2. Click on “my stuff”
3. Click on your bike that is having thumbnail issues
4. Click “edit” at the top of the screen
5. On your computer, rename the photos
6. Put these photos in the edit screen on #4
7. …
8. Upload and profit!

I will write up a post discussing the server upgrade and the cause of the thumbnail issues. For the time being, renaming and reuploading your photos will solve the problem.

As always, contact me with any questions.

Best,

- Greg

I am a big believer in competition, people will use the best service available.

The Bicycle Social Networking Scheme is Getting Busy

When I started velospace in December 2005 there was no social networking site dedicated to bikes. Fixed Gear Gallery has been around forever, but it is not a social networking site – its a photo album with a message board tacked on.

velospace is the leader in bicycle social networking. We paved the road for the sites that followed and are far more successful than anyone else in this area because of what we offer.

The past two and a half years have seen a gradual increase in bike related social networking sites. I have kept tabs on them to see what they are doing, how they are doing it and whether they are doing it better than I am. Who are the players?

• Bicycle Room – little to no activity, 29 bikes total, stale.
• BikeSpace – been in “alpha” since it launched a year ago, couple hundred bikes, no sign of life from the developers.
• MyByk – brand new, marketing centric, social – networking – meets – focus – group, active developers and a former promoter (who has since moved on) with a column in Road Magazine.

So whats worth looking at? Bicycle Room appears to be dead. BikeSpace appears to be dormant on the development end, but getting a trickle of user activity. MyByk is too new to know what sort of reception they will get, making it the site most worth taking a look at.

MyByk sez it “will be the most comprehensive online community for all segments of the cycling market upon launch” and that “leading bicycle manufacturers, dealers and advocates have been actively involved in shaping MyByk and tuning its functionality to complement their efforts.” Bicycle Newswire.

Reading between the lines, and looking at what MyByk is currently offering, its pretty obvious that they are designing their site as a front end for advertising to get pushed out to bikers. This petri dish has users as the specimens and bicycle brands as the observers. The site already has “Featured Brands,” “Featured Products,” and no less than 5 advertisements on the homepage; not bad for a site with less than 25 users.

It will be interested to see how MyByk evolves and to see what advertisers they Josh Kadis can get on board (Ritchey is the only early adopter as of now but Kadis has been hawking the site in Road Magazine, at Interbike and presumably behind the scenes as well) can get on board, what their draw is for users, and how the hyper-advertising model works out. I’ll repeat the first 14 words of this post here – I am a big believer in competition, people will use the best service available.

Ed. note, 7/8/08: Kadis contacted me and related that his affiliation with MyByk ended in January of 2008, updated post accordingly.

Competition benefits users. They are the reason why all of these sites exist. The inevitable outcome of competition amongst ourselves vying for attention from the same pool of users is that everyone will have to keep improving to capture users’ attention.

Ideas or comments? Send me a note!

- Greg, velospace.org