Our traffic rank at Alexa got updated again, and we reached the top 37,000 sites on the internet today!




We also said Bonjour to our first French profile this week, and even got a mention on the The Times website technology section, which was pretty exciting.

Thanks to everyone who is spreading the word - please keep it up!

Our Alexa ranking has been updated again - not bad for a site which has only been online less than two months... and our daily traffic rank means we are the top 63,000 sites on the internet!

We had our first Irish visitor add a pixel profile today, and the picture was of the lady in question's gorgeous dog (in case you wonder why I am not linking individual profiles in this blog, it is to avoid any bias in rankings). The favourite website - The Million Dog Wall Project deserves a special mention however, as it is a not-for-profit pixel type site raising awareness for Animal Rights. I'm more of a cat person myself, but some of those pooches look very lovable.

I have also noticed a couple of Million People Page wannabes popping up in the last month (it was bound to happen). Most are not as featured as the original though and one of them is asking $5 per picture (with no profile)!

One other pixel site I came across worthy of mention is Million Dollar London. I love the twist on the original pixel advertising format with all the moving buses, taxis and tube trains. The homepage takes a fair bit of time to load, but it is worth it to hear the 'mind the gap'.

Reminds me of all the years I used to commute to the 'big smoke'...

Well, this week the Americans seem to have overcome their shyness and have started joining the site - 6 joining today alone - although for some reason many of them seem to be a little camera shy... This week also saw our first Kiwi, so it seems there is some life downunder after all (and the Kiwis are beating the Aussies so far )!

After drifting a little in the week, traffic has started spiking again - over 350 unique visitors and 1000 page views today alone - so perhaps some of our newer signups have been busy telling their friends. It is always exciting to login and see the new signups and how many people have been on the site, and we have been getting lots of positive feedback on the site, so thank you.

I have added a nifty counter which people can add to their blog or webpage. It is automatically updated as each new profile is added, so you can easily keep track of the number of people on the site. The html you need to add is here:

<a title="The Million People Page" href="http://www.millionpeoplepage.com/"><img src="http://www.millionpeoplepage.com/images/counter.jpg" alt="The Million People Page - Progress Update" height="50" width="440" border="0"></a>

The counter displays like this:

I have been pretty happy with the response to the site so far - and with a full index in Google now, people are starting to find the site in searches. 30 people have added profiles so far - thats almost one every day the site has been online - and traffic has been steadily growing all week. Alexa has moved our traffic rank from an initial rank of 3,600,000 to 2,399,000 already, and our average this week puts us in the top million websites... Even better, our daily traffic rank even made us the 300,000th most popular site on the internet on Wednesday this week! Wow - that's the power of word of mouth!

But this site is all about people finding out who they are connected to - via six degrees of separation - so in order to really grow the number of connections quickly I have made payment optional for now. People who make a contribution with their profile order will have their profile added within 24/48 hours, and be listed with no adverts. All other profiles submitted are not guaranteed entry, and if listed, these profiles may contain ads.

My very canny wife, Heidi, had the idea of creating a 'Top Sites' page to make the favourite websites feature more prominent, and the site an even better advertising proposition for people primarily wanting to plug a website.

So, here are the top websites on the Million People Page. By Rank, lists the websites chosen by the top ranked people, and By Popularity selects the websites most often chosen by people on the site.

I have also relaxed the validation on the buy a pixel profile page so that only Country and email address are mandatory, as some of my friends let me know that they would love to join in, but were uncomfortable with the information they had to give. So you can leave out anything you don't want to include (like Birthday) or even the photo if you are camera shy. Email addresses are used for ordering purposes only and DO NOT form part of your profile.

On the press front, I have contacted some of the top UK news providers: BBC News; Sky News; and The Register, as well as my favourite magazine, BBC Focus, and radio station, Virgin Radio.

No responses yet, but ever the opimist...