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Big thanks to Yahoo!’s Dustin Whittle, Senior Tech Yahoo!/Open Evangelist, for a great presentation on developing Web Services (i.e. APIs) using the PHP Symfony Framework. Yahoo! wrote/rewrote Answers, Delicious, Bookmarks and much more in Symfony and we’ve been using it for a number of recent projects and a number in the pipeline. It’s significantly reduced development time on complicated projects and provides with a very robust unified platform for future products.

Congrats to Paul Thrasher, our Lead Engineer who has been organizing the events. Attendance was already double the first meet-up and a number of companies were represented. If you want to learn more about Symfony or share how you are using it, join the Bay Area Symfony developer’s group and make it to an upcoming meet-up.

UPDATE 9/21/09: This position is now filled. Thanks

Contractual Software Developer Needed to Integrate Facebook Connect

Project description and need:
Dogster, Inc. is seeking a contractual developer to fully integrate Facebook Connect into Dogster and Catster. We will be allowing members to register and login via Facebook Connect as well as link their Dogster/Catster accounts with their Facebook account. We will also be using the FB social graph to connect existing friends, cross-post uploads and more. Developer must have previous experience with FB Connect, FBML and javascript and have previously integrated Facebook into large online properties.

Developer must also be experienced in LAMP technologies (PHP, AJAX, HTML, CSS, MYSQL) for integration on the Dogster/Catster platform. References and access to your previous implementations of FB Connect required. You must be available to work with a product manager and proficient at working from specs, mock-ups and project plans.

This is a contract position and not a full-time position. However, for the right person it could evolve to full time.

To apply:
Email cover letter and resume to the username “jobs” at our website’s domain of dogster.com.
Include several references, public examples of FB integrations and compensation requirements.

About us:
Dogster, Inc. is a seriously fun company to work with based out of Potrero Hill, San Francisco that has been serving Internet goodness since 2004. We have a great team, highly passionate users and are very financially stable. Two of the founders are still active developers and the whole team contributes to the sites’ success and growth. While we think it would benefit both parties if you were in Bay Area and able to meet/work in our San Francisco office regularly, it is by no means a requirement. If you live outside San Francisco and solid references, lots of public, related projects under your belt we’d be more than happy to work with you.

UPDATE 9/21/09: This work has been completd. Thanks

Contractual Software Developer Needed to Build Dynamic Site Toolbar

Project description and need:
Dogster, Inc. is seeking a contractual developer to build and integrate a dynamic, HTML overlay toolbar similar to those on Digg, Facebook and other sites. The toolbar will be dynamic in the sense that content and height will change based on user profile, user status, current promotions or other product directives. The toolbar must work on all major browsers and properly layer over elements such as flash.

Developer must be extremely competent in HTML layers, browser-specific issues, AJAX as well as LAMP technologies (PHP, HTML, CSS, MYSQL). References and access to your previous implementations of similar functionality required. You must be available to work with a product manager and proficient at working from specs, mock-ups and project plans.

This is a contract position and not a full-time position. However, for the right person it could evolve to full time.
To apply:
Email cover letter and resume to the username “jobs” at our website’s domain of dogster.com.
Include several references, public examples of previous toolbar or overlay work and compensation requirements

About us:
Dogster, Inc. is a seriously fun company to work with based out of Potrero Hill, San Francisco that has been serving Internet goodness since 2004. We have a great team, highly passionate users and are very financially stable. Two of the founders are still active developers and the whole team contributes to the sites’ success and growth. While we think it would benefit both parties if you were in Bay Area and able to meet/work in our San Francisco office regularly, it is by no means a requirement. If you live outside San Francisco and solid references, lots of public, related projects under your belt we’d be more than happy to work with you.

It’s no secret that welcoming visitors to your site that are coming from a known location increases those visitors’ primary engagement metrics. Pages per visits and time on site goes up, bounce rate goes down.

Where this becomes extremely interesting is when that traffic is coming from a social bookmarking site. We get a lot of traffic from StumbleUpon, so in our blogs we set up dedicated messages to welcome returning and first-time Stumblers. It has changed spikes of traffics into long run-off ramps. The importance of this referrer message was driven home when we a cat blog entry became a thumbs-up hit on StumbleUpon but we had forgotten to activate the refer message.

This screen shot shows a spike of 12,309 visitors from StumbleUpon on April 12th to The Cat’s Meow, our cats and kittens blog with another 3,100 visits since then.

The second screen shot shows a spike of 12,180 visitors to Snuzzy our cute and fuzzy blog on January 27th that led to another 80,000 visitors in the ensuing 2 weeks.

These results may be above average, the next time we get a hit from StumbleUpon to our cat blog (after we’ve resumed showing the helpful message to Stumblers) I’ll post the results. But without a doubt the blogs that have Stumbler referrer messages no longer see towering visitor spikes and instead show much more meaningful long run-off ramps.

UPDATE: 4/21/09
Some readers did not understand why referrer messages are so effective for visitors from social bookmarking sites. To clarify I’ve added a screenshot of the message shown to a repeat visitor from StumbleUpon. Note that the first option is for them to StumbleUp. We also quickly remind them what content we post on our site, make it easy for them to join our community on SU, as well as subscribe to the blog feed, and also to join our community and explore some existing crowd-pleaser posts.

We’ve written about Ben Stein’s feelings about the benefit of sharing your life with a dog before. Here on CBS he flat-out suggests that if you’re having a hard, stressful, confusing year … get a dog. “all of life is better with a dog” he says. And he’s right.

Watch CBS Videos Online

 
3 years ago Hurricane Katrina separated 600,000 pets from their families. Most were never reunited. Since then we’ve seen family pets languish in shelters after the fires in Southern California, the floods in Iowa and even the ice storms earlier this month in Kentucky and West Virgina. Just as unbelievable are the statistics that one in three dogs and cats will get lost in their lifetime and more than half do not find their way back home. We hear all too often of pets that end up at shelters on euthanasia lists because the microchip they had wasn’t found by the scanner or the phone number associated with the chip was unavailable.

This confounded us. How could a beloved pet’s connection to their family be so tenuous even though we live in an age of innovative technology? Last year we started discussions with the Bay Area Red Cross who were also very concerned about people’s utter lack of emergency preparedness for their pets (and themselves). We realized that what was needed was a tag that improved upon the traditional single point of contact ID tags that most people still rely on. Our research showed us that such a tag was of great interest to owners, especially if it was priced similarly to a traditional tag and didn’t require annual renewal fees or update charges.

Thus Dogster, Inc. made Together Tag, the world’s first web-based, always-on smart pet tag. A one-time fee of $25 enrolls a dog or cat for their lifetime, with no hidden renewal or subscription costs. Online enrollment is easy, and owners have the option of including primary, secondary, and out-of-state contacts in their pet’s profile, as well as a photo, vet contact info, and any special health, diet and care information. Profile and contact information can be updated any time, for free, making it easy to update your account information while you are on vacation, for example, or if a friend or family member is caring for your pet.

When a pet is reported as missing, we immediately send out alerts to shelters in the area where the pet went missing, as well as to community members – similar to an Amber Alert for missing persons. Members can also use our easy tool to make a printable “lost pet” poster to post in their neighborhood.

One final reason we wanted to do this is to help the Red Cross with their pet safety program, and in doing so help raise awareness about emergency preparedness in general. Dogster and Catster donates $5 for every identification tag sold to the American Red Cross. Proceeds help to support its pet safety program.

To learn more about Together Tag and enroll your pets go to http://www.togethertag.com.

Screenshot: Homepage.

Screeshot: Found Pet Profile Page.

Click images to enlarge

Some Spokespets:

In the 5 years since I started the company I’ve had the pleasure and not so pleasure of doing interview. Last week Andrew Warner of Mixergy interviewed me at length and it was a pleasure. He really knew his stuff, and in accordance with the times he focused it on how to maximize your available resources, determining what is most critical and an oldie but a goodie, how to find work and revenue in a downturn.

He titled it: If At First You Don’t Succeed, Maybe You Should Give Up, but maybe I would have called it “How to Know you Have a Hit … and When You Don’t” ;) It’s gotten a great response int eh comments and on twitter, and if you’re looking to run a profitable Internet business or start one, I think you will find it valuable.

[This and other great interviews can be seen at Mixergy]

Earlier this month I gave a presentation at the Startonomics Conference at UCLA on how to use OKRs, KPIs and discipline to grow your Internet business. I then walk through a case study showing how we used these methodologies to increase our search traffic by 300% in a 15 month period. Not bad for a web service that had already been live for 3 years.

How to Create a Website that Users Eat Up & Beg for More

[Video recorded and hosted by TechZulu]

You can follow along with the original slides:

The Startonomics conferences are put on by the high quality DealMaker Media. If you are starting or growing an Internet business you do a lot worse than catching the next one.

With no notice Yahoo quietly started directing pets.yahoo.com users to a subsection of their women’s vertical Shine.

[Excuse me while I have a David vs. Goliath moment.]

The demise of pets.yahoo.com comes as no surprise, the once popular and lucrative profitable pets.yahoo.com has literally been on cruise control for the last 3 years, without even a dedicated project manager over seeing it. The site homepage rarely changed content, the forums contained unmoderated profanities and nefarious scam-style listings could be seem in the message boards.

It was also a ghost ship on the enterprise-side. Trying to find someone who had the authority to discuss partnerships or licensing deals was like trying to speak to a human at a HMO provider. And we worked over a dozen inside channels. The running joke among their sales people was that thanks to falling page views and a long-term multi-million flat-fee contract with a single advertiser signed in the bubble era, Yahoo Pets was getting ridiculously high CPMs (> $100) for years and had to do almost nothing for it. And it was also understood that eventually the ghost ship would run aground.

Moving it from a dying huge portal to a nascent but growing vertical is the practical move, but now pets on yahoo will be relegated to being a sub-vertical of a vertical which is about the same as being a subsection of a portal. The Shine ad sales team – which I’m sure is quite solid – simply won’t be able to put the the same effort into a sub-vertical. The uniques and page views just won’t add up and neither will the commissions. Likewise, the product manager overseeing the pets sub-vertical won’t have the opportunity to obsess over content like the Shine homepage manager will.

Pure unadulterated passion is what advertisers are looking for and why no pet advertiser ever doubts they’ll reach their target audience with us. It’s what leads them to golden households and lifelong customers. And anything less offers significantly less. You can argue that getting the extended reach of a greater women’s network will increase advertisers and lift impressions, but that’s not what we’re seeing with the integration of NBC’s Petside.com into iVillage.com last year.

It’s a shame really. Yahoo, for all it’s management failings, is one of the truly great people-positive brands. There’s so much they could have done with pets.yahoo.com if they hadn’t been floundering the last 3 years. But what’s worse is there’s so much we could have done with it for them (such as increasing revenue 10x) but they couldn’t even consider that because they had to switch over to focusing only on whale-sized deals. But Yahoo and Shine, we’re still here and will always be open to making great music together. Meanwhile we’ll be doing what the small furry mammals did when the dinosaurs became extinct and exploit the opportunity with all our abilities … after all, behaving like small furry mammals is in our nature.