Author: Amy Armitage

Last year Tiara Rea shared a social web 2.0 site with me called Bestuff.com and I was hooked. The community is so much fun and you can share all your favorite things, and also vote on the other content within the site. Over the weeks I got to know the owners (a couple of Aussie guys) and just like a cyber fairytale, Lunarpages was proudly hosting their site.

A few months later I received a phone call from Rick Ross, introducing himself as having acquired the site. We got to chatting and he showed me their network of sites which included DZone.com and JavaLobby.org. I was totally impressed with Rick’s charm and dynamic energy, as well as his obvious passion for all things geeky.

Let’s face it… we are all familiar with sites such as Digg.com and Slashdot.org, but in my opinion DZone does it so much better, with quality developer content, less spam, and a fair shot at the spotlight. So you can imagine how stoked I am that Rick agreed to sit down and chat with me about his wonderful site!

But enough yapping… we should get started with the obvious question…

How did DZone come to be and when was it created?

In December, 2005 Matt Schmidt, Mike Urban and I were hanging out in our office talking about how we all really liked the concept of Digg, but how we all felt that Digg simply didn’t deliver the quality of links that real developers would be most interested in. We wanted a site that was specifically focused on developer links without any of the silly stuff that so often dominates Digg. With typical coder arrogance, we all foolishly agreed we could build it in a week. About six months later we were actually ready to launch DZone. Never count on software developers for reliable planning and scheduling!

How is DZone different than DIGG?

In a word, “focus.” DZone is laser-focused on developer topics, and our moderator team is not at all shy about nuking links that are off-topic. When we launched DZone, the “programming” sub-category on Digg was only about 3% of Digg’s total coverage, and recently it has declined still further. Programming and developer topics simply don’t seem to matter to the Digg audience, but they are the mainstay of DZone. Since last June, only 2-3 developer links per week have been promoted on Digg, while 30-40 per day are typically promoted on DZone. If you’re a developer wanting to stay current and find something fresh, then DZone probably has more to offer you.

How many active users are part of the DZone community?

That’s a tough question to answer because the overwhelming majority of any social bookmarking site’s users are never logged in. There’s something described as the “90-9-1 rule” of online communities which basically suggests that 90% of users will be almost completely passive, 9% will contribute occasionally, and the remaining 1% will do most of the heavy lifting. In general, I would have to say this rule seems to apply, but even the passive users are “active” in the sense that they contribute by viewing and clicking the links. On any given day DZone sends about 20,000 to 25,000 visitors to other developer websites, and that number is growing quickly. In its first year DZone sent more than 5 million visitors to other websites, but I won’t be surprised if we more than double that in our second year. We have had several thousand members participate by submitting nearly 50,000 links that point to over 10,000 unique domains.

Why do you think DZone is so popular?

That’s easy – it is the community. DZone has a truly amazing core community of members who contribute great links, vote on them, help us filter out spam and irrelevant links, and generally keep the quality high. Without these awesome community members DZone would be like a big room decorated for a party, but where nobody shows up. How much fun would that be? The technology behind DZone is clean and powerful, but there’s no question in my mind that the real success of DZone is a reflection of the awesome quality of our community members. These people sincerely care, and since they are prepared to work hard to make DZone a great resource, we feel we owe it to them to do the same. I’m proud to be part of the DZone community myself, and I have met some of the smartest and most innovative developers anywhere because of DZone. Some people would say we’re all just nerds and geeks, but I am glad to be one!

I was reading an article recently about DZone and it mentioned the lack of pagination on the site. Comments?

In April, 2007 we launched a major overhaul of the original DZone design, and we switched from traditional pagination to an Ajax-driven mode that employs what we call “just-in-time” link fetching. In effect, you can scroll through the links almost indefinitely. As you get close to the bottom of the list, your browser will hit our server and grab a new bunch of links and let you keep on scrolling (at least until you reach the very end.) Traffic numbers and trends prove unequivocally that this new mode radically outperforms the original mode, which provide more traditional pagination. In every significant metric the numbers shot higher with the new mode. Still, there’s just no such thing as “one size fits all” and some people don’t like this Ajax-driven system. For those folks, we have kept the original interface available. They simply need to visit and they’ll get the old form of pagination or they can also get the new one.

You’re regarded as one of the Java rock stars. How did this fame occur?

Must be a mistake. I’m a rapper. Surely you have seen me on MTV?

What other projects are in store for the DZone team?

Well, we have active development occurring along several fronts. Soon we will add support for video, screencasting and PDF documents into the core DZone social bookmarking application. These are much needed content-type extensions which will allow community members to share links to more than just web pages. We are also working on better integration between DZone and our own content communities like Javalobby.org and EclipseZone.com. We will be launching a suite of new content destination communities focused on a variety of cool developer topics like AjaxZone, RubyZone, VistaZone and so on. These will work hand-in-hand with DZone.com as our flagship site to deliver great, highly focused content to specific developer groups. Finally, we have a cool project planned for our DeveloperBlogs.com domain, where we hope to build a great network of (you guessed it!) developer blogs.

Congratulations on your newest acquisition Bestuff.com! Tell us more about it.

Bestuff.com is an exciting social networking experiment. It provides a unique visual navigation system where tens of thousands of people vote for all their favorite things in life. Words really don’t do it justice, so readers should probably just visit the site to play around and see whether they like it. The site is growing very rapidly, and we’ll soon be providing a Facebook application that connects to Bestuff. I think it will be even more exciting once our members can show a Bestuff collage widget on their Facebook pages to share the stuff they like best. We actually just made our very first Bestuff t-shirts yesterday, and the response from people who have seen them suggests they will be very, very popular. I’ll send you one if you promise to model it!

An excellent segue to some Amy interview fun! So Rick… we want to hear about your best and worst:

Road trip

Best: I’d have to change the names to protect the guilty! Most recently, my favorite road trip was my family’s return trip from Michigan to North Carolina this summer. We stopped in this crazy town in Ohio for the final Harry Potter book release party. The whole town had literally transformed itself to a Harry Potter and Hogwarts world. It was awesome.
Worst: Leaving NYC to move south. I loved living in the city, and I was terribly sad to move away. Fortunately, it turned out to have been a great choice, so I’m glad we moved.

Date

Best: When my very close friend, Elizabeth, and I took a walk on the beach on a moonlit, Spring night and she let me know she wanted to kiss me. We have now been married over 15 years.
Worst: My first date at 13 (early 70′s.) I took a girl named Susan Heneberry to a Yes concert, but we had nothing whatsoever in common. The first was the worst.


Flight

Best: Our “second honeymoon” flight to Paris on our tenth anniversary. At first the airline had screwed up and wasn’t going to have seats available for us, then they bumped us up to first-class! It was great.
Worst: Matt and I were flying home from San Francisco, and Northworst stranded us overnight in the Minneapolis airport for no good reason. That airport is really weird and desolate at 4AM.

Online moment

Best: There have been lots of great ones. A recent favorite was watching DZone send our one millionth visitor to another site. We have sent millions more since then, but I guess it’s true that your first million is the hardest to get.
Worst: Watching one of my early websites crash and go offline on Thanksgiving Day in 1997 because it had a sudden surge of traffic. That was an awful feeling.

Movie

Best: I love all kinds of movies. I’ll say “The Princess Bride” or “When Harry Met Sally.”
Worst: I can’t spare the brain cells to remember them.

Conference

Best: My true favorite was probably an Amiga hacker party in a mountain village in Switzerland about 20 years ago. Hundreds of the best European Amiga hackers had gathered, and it was an incredible experience. I miss the Amiga.
Worst: A Java conference in NYC almost immediately after the 9/11 attack. I traveled on one of the first flights into NYC after they let the planes start flying again, and the whole event was very sad. The conference was a success, however, simply because it was the first one that proceeded as planned after the disruption of the terrorist attack.

Thanks so much for taking the time to chat with Lunarpages, Rick!