Tuesday, March 3, 2009

Limits

Swaggle has been stumbling a bit under the load of its users recently (and no, we can't invest in increased infrastructure, see the previous post). To help relieve the pressure, we've imposed a few limits you should be aware of:
  • Groups are limited to 60 people
  • Chat-type groups are limited to 100 outgoing messages / 5 minutes. If you have 10 people in a group and each one sends one message, that's 10 x 10 = 100 messages.
However, as noted in the previous post, we are big believers in the gift economy. If your group is involved in the gift economy in some way (e.g., SantaCon / Burner related) and you need an exemption, please contact us and let us know the story.

How Swaggle Profits

It's been over a year since I updated this blog. Truth is, Swaggle just putters along, serving the many mostly without a complaint.

You may have noticed that there doesn't seem to be a business model behind Swaggle. There are no ads anywhere, either on the web site or in the messages. There is no subscriptions being paid. So, how do we make any money?

We don't. And no, this isn't one of those "we lose money on every customer, but make it up in volume" or "we'll figure it out later" Internet bubble services. We're just not that interested in making money. (From Swaggle, that is. If you organize conferences or events, talk to us about Pathable).

At Swaggle, we're big believers in the gift economy. If everyone gives things away, you don't have to worry about keeping accounts balanced or making sure everything is fair. This isn't barter, where we agree to give something in return for something else. It's a gift. Things come around, we're not worried.

We created Swaggle because we wanted to use it and we wanted to provide it to our friends. If more people can benefit, mores the better.

If you get some benefit from it and feel you need to pay for it, we encourage you to go out of your way to do something nice for someone else, expecting nothing in return. If enough people do that, we'll consider Swaggle profitable, indeed.