A few days ago, I was thinking of ways to drive more traffic to 22Talk. Unlike my other websites, 22Talk’s traffic is more time dependent in that more than 1 user must be online at the same time for it to work at all (and lots more for it to work effectively).

I tried StumbleUpon Ads a few months ago, and that worked well: I managed to get around 50 simultaneous users online (for about 15 minutes, though). Unfortunately, only a small number of users from these campaigns returned to 22Talk, making the site useless again. And at $0.05 per visitor, I was unable to see how I would re-coup my costs.

But then, on Saturday, I had an epiphany: Rather than drive users to 22Talk, why not drive 22Talk to the users? And then, 22Talk on Facebook was born. It is more-or-less identical to how 22Talk worked before, but in the more social environment of Facebook. Because of Facebook’s great API, I have been able to make the site more user-orientated: If you find someone you like, you can now add them as a friend for life! (You can also go completely Anonymous, if you prefer).

The app is brand new (not in the directory yet). At the moment, you could be waiting a while for a stranger to come along — but please do wait. Please tell all of your Facebook friends to try it out, blog about this, and let’s see whether we can get enough users to get 22Talk rolling.

Merry Christmas!

Taxomation.com have just released ‘404 widget‘ — a useful tool for helping your site’s lost users. The widget looks at the URL a visitor tried to load, and extracts keywords from it. It then runs over to Yahoo! and finds related pages from your site — all just in time to be displayed to the visitor, who can choose a page or keep searching.

It is similar to Google’s widget, except that more than one page is displayed and text from the page is also included. The Taxomation widget can be customised for your site (changing colours, etc) and is simple to set-up: you just need to copy a little code, and everything works instantly. Why not grab yours now, and see what you think…

Here’s a live example for the page ‘http://webinfodb.net/api.html‘ rather than ‘http://webinfodb.net/api.php‘:

(If you are looking for another example, mis-type a URL on this site; it has the widget installed).

You may also be interested in reading the following about creating more useful 404 pages:

• Creating User Friendly 404 Pages (Coding Horror)
• Creating useful 404 pages (Google)
• A More Useful 404 (A List Apart)
• Make your 404 Page Useful (Blog for Profit)
• Usability: Create a 404 page that’s useful and relevant (azngamerboi 2.0)