MochiBot Blog

Seeing MochiBot gain traction with the Flash development community is great! However, we never expected to grow so dramatically so suddenly. We had to deal with some tremendous increases in traffic over the past weekend and it’s taken a lot more work than we anticipated to handle the growth. You’ll notice your traffic stats are off, but worry not because we’re working on the system.

You don’t have to worry about this outage affecting your SWFs. MochiBot will have no effect on your content and any outage will be completely unnoticeable to your audience. The only effect that this outage will have is on the stats that you see on our site.

Thanks to everyone for spreading the word about MochiBot and helping us to grow. We’re working hard to manage this growth and these growing pains will result in a much improved system for everyone.

**UPDATE (Feb 28, 2006 @ 11:04am) : We’ve taken care of the backlog of data that needed to be processed and your stats should be appearing as expected on the site. If you notice any inconsisitencies, then please let us know what’s wrong by emailing us at support@mochibot.com

If you’ve noticed a dip in your traffic yesterday (Saturday, February 25), don’t worry there’s nothing wrong with your SWF. The dip in traffic was due to a brief outage that we had between 10am and 2pm yesterday. It wasn’t a complete outage, but we weren’t able to process a lot of our incoming traffic so that explains the partial traffic data.

One of our users has been using MochiBot in some content on MySpace and it got really popular so all that traffic started clogging our pipes up. It really goes to show how powerful MySpace is. They’re currently ranked #9 in Alexa and just a fraction of that traffic can be in the millions in terms of hits.

Everything is back to normal now and we’re keeping a close eye on performance. I’m heading out to Flashforward tomorrow so I’ll try to blog some highlights from the conference.

Both Bob and I will be trekking to conferences in the coming days and we’d love to meet up with some of you. Bob will be heading to PyCon in Dallas, TX tomorrow and staying for the sprint through Feb 28. I’ll be heading to Seattle, WA for Flashforward next week (Feb 27) and staying until Mar 2.

Neither of us will be speaking so we’ll be free to hang out if any of you are out at the conferences. Feel free to email us: jameson at mochimedia.com or bob at mochimedia.com.

We just released a new build last night that dramatically increased the speed of the reports. The compromise that we had to make was to make all of the reports reflect the previous day’s traffic (in US Pacific Standard Time) instead of the past 24 hours. Now when you create a new MochiBot and test it the traffic results won’t be immediately available. This will result in some blind testing but we’ll work on a way to address this issue. We’re also working on bringing back the Past 24 Hours report so don’t worry them being forgotten.

We hope that these improvements make your MochiBot experience more enjoyable. We’re working hard to make MochiBot the best Flash tracking tool out there so leave us some feedback and let us know how we’re doing.

GDC 06 is coming up soon (March 20-24) and I’ll be speaking on the topic of advergaming trends. The business of developing online casual games to build brand awareness has been big business for a lot of development shops and the trend is only getting stronger. Until recently the task of quantifying and tracking these games has been non-standardized and quite tedious. With all of the games MochiBot is tracking we’ve begun to see trends and new strategies in how to interpret traffic data.

If you’re going to GDC this year and are interested in this topic, then stop by for a visit. I’ll post the slides of my talk in this blog when it’s all done and over with.

Happy Valentine’s Day! MochiBot ♥ you

We’ve been pretty swamped recently with improving site performance so Ryan had some fun with the blog and created a new look. He also added a new section in the right sidebar called “Enjoying” for us to highlight some of the cool things that keep us entertained through the long days.

We hope that you like the new blog design!

A lot of you have been experiencing long wait times for your reports to load and we apologize immensely for how slow it has become. Ya, I know it really sucks! We’ve been continually growing so it’s now time that we upgraded our servers. Over the next few weeks we’ll be working on ways to speed things back up and purchasing new servers for the system. In the meantime please bear with us while we work on improving your experience.

Thanks!

Our friends at Jamungo have recently launched a new limited series line of vinyl toys called BlowUpDolls. The characters are sweet, but the short animation for the BUDs really kicks ass!