The last couple of months have seen plenty of new countries joining the site - including India, Israel, Venezuela and Brazil. In fact, 26 countries are now represented, and there are over 300 people listed so far, which is over one every day - and the number of people adding profiles has been accelerating over time, which is great.

The most popular birthdays so far are 11th November, 31st May, and 23rd January, and there are some interesting degrees of separation developing.

The Easter Egg feature has also been significantly enhanced, so if you haven't found it yet, keep looking!

And be sure to keep up with your ranking by visiting your profile regularly...

We made a minor site update over the weekend, adding shortcut/accessibility keys to the main navigation. These work like windows shortcut keys, so that if you press ALT and the underlined letter in the menu item, you will be taken to that page. On a Mac, you hold down CTRL and the key.

So, for example, if you want to visit the homepage, you can press ALT-o (or CTRL-o on a Mac).

We passed the 200 profile milestone this week, and welcomed profiles from Italy and India.

Whilst chatting to the receptionist at my local dental surgery this morning, she told me that May 4th this year will be very special. Actually, two minutes and three seconds past 1am on May 4th, to be precise.

That is because at that time it will be:

01:02:03 on 04/05/06

Well, in the UK anyway... the Americans would have had this special date on 5th April...

We had our first Canadian join the site over the weekend - and looking forward to many more. To make the site more accessible to people worldwide, and encourage more people to join in, we have tweaked the listing criteria so that people without the means to make the $2 payment can list their profile free - we will add such profiles when our advertising revenues and/or donations to the site covers the cost of each free profile.

Free profiles are not guaranteed listing, will contain ads, and the favourite website link will not be clickable, so if you are wanting to promote a website, then paying is still the way to go...

Sorry, the movers screen and rankings data is all over the place today because I have tweaked the ranking algorithm so that it takes account of people who have made referral connections.

This is to ensure that the ranking system continues to work as originally intended, i.e. allowing the most connected people to move up the rankings, rather than just the most visually appealing (or unusual!) people who get lots of profile views.

The movers screen and ranking changes should straighten themselves out overnight when they are recalculated.

I think this new algorithm will make the ranking system fairer for those who join as time goes on, as well as emphasising one of the primary aims of the site - letting people discover their 'six degrees of separation'. This way, people can now proactively gain ranking by making connections, as well as by generating profile views.

Our first German profile added today, adding a splash of purple to the picture board. Not sure what he is holding in his hand... answers on a postcard please. Looking forward to seeing more purple on the page soon, as well as some of the other European countries.

Erklären Sie bitte Ihren Freunden über die Million Leute-Seite.
(Please tell your friends about the Million People Page)

At least I hope thats what it says...

For all you ranking junkies out there, I have added a new page on the site which shows the The Million People Page's biggest movers (up and down) on the site. This page will be updated when the rankings are recalculated each day.

Your change in ranking is also now shown on your profile page, so you can see how much you have moved up or down since the last ranking update.

Remember, your ranking on the site depends on the number of visitors to your profile, so by telling lots of people you are on the site you could be one of the movers and shakers too!

I have added an enhancement so that when it is someones birthday, their name shows up on the homepage. Also, when you view their profile, a Happy Birthday message is displayed.

As luck would have it, it is someones birthday today

If all one million people add their birthday, then by the laws of averages, there will be approximately 2740 birthdays every day. Wow...

But even more surprising is that according to Mathtrek it only takes 23 people in a group for there to be a 50/50 chance that two or more people share a birthday!

As of today (with 67 people on the site) there are already THREE people with the same birthday (1st November). I'll leave it you to find them...

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 enhanced the image upload facility so that images which are not square to start with are cropped to 90x90 pixels rather than squeezed. This should hopefully cut down some of the distortion in some people's photos, and means that it is no longer so important whether the photo is square to start with.

Yesterday was a busy day - 8 people added profiles - so looks like things are beginning to happen. Chains of referrals are starting to appear (we already have 4 degrees of separation on the site) and people are starting to change ranks as the profiles get viewed by new visitors.

No international profiles yet, so if you have any friends outside the UK, get them to add a pixel profile!