the wind’s in my ears
and it’s all that i hear
now the voice of love
has departed.

swoooooooooshing white
                fressshhhly venting
                      sussurant, sustaining
                                    soft whistling
                                        sea breezing
                                               zephyr

its incessant near-sensuous suspiration
supplants the sweet nothings of yesterday.

some say you can find the ocean
held hostage
in a conch’s murmur.

yet it is
in the wind’s whisper
i now find you
unheld.

You'd think as Xanga fades (membership, pageviews, time spent on site, etc.) that its server resources would be less strained and that performance would increase.  Apparently not.

A new social networking tracking site called DownOrNot tracks performance issues on twenty popular social networking sites (Xanga among them.)  Not all twenty are shown below, but the worst performing is - and that is Xanga - with only two green arrows up over the last week.

"To coincide with the launch of Social.DownorNot.com, WatchMouse monitored the availability and performance of 20 leading social networking websites during the period of August 1, 2010 to September 7, 2010. The results revealed that only Orkut recorded 100% uptime, followed closely by Flickr (99.99%), Del.icio.us (99.97%) and hi5 (99.93%). Facebook came in at 99.90% due to recent DNS issues, and Digg managed to land in the bottom five due to issues associated with their version 4 release the last week of August. More than one-third of the social networking sites monitored fell into the unacceptable category including MySpace (95.63%), followed by YouTube (95.93%), Classmates (96.98%), Digg (97.84%), StumbleUpon (97.99%), Foursquare (98.83%) and Xanga (98.88%) ."

  -WatchMouse Launches Social.DownOrNot

Again, Xanga is near the bottom.

“Young companies like Foursquare which have gained popularity and success quickly are likely to have growing pains such as site overload or breakage,” continued Pors. “More established websites however, such as MySpace and YouTube that are linked to larger organizations should not have any excuses.

Xanga should not have growing pains.  It should have shrinking gains. 

I wonder if Xanga really deletes our photos when we "delete" them from our Photo Manager?

You know, everyone once in a while posts an embarrassing pic in a stupid moment and then wants to efface it, right?

So what's the fate of that photo?  To disappear from Xanga altogether with no further reference possible?

Or to stay intact on Xanga's photo server ready to be served up to anyone who happened to copy the original link?

If you really own your own data on Xanga and Xanga really respects your privacy it will be deleted, right?

The following is a test to see if Xanga actually believes that you own your personal data.   If, below, you see me hugging a tree, a photo I have deleted from my Photoblog and have expunged in every way available to me, then Xanga is hugging your photos, too, longer than it should. 

Update: the pic keeps coming and going, sometimes showing, sometimes not found.  So I've uploaded and deleted the same pic twice to see if maybe, just maybe, Xanga is deleting the pic on some primary server but retaining it on some clustered replicate for some period of time.

This test inspired by Half Of Social Networking Sites Keep Users' Photos After Deletion: Study

Well, I asked John, Xanga CEO-type, to comment on my last blog about spambots and he never did.  But either 1) I did Xanga a public service by bringing this to the attention of someone on the XangaTeam, or 2) like I have often been, I was ahead of the curve on the spambot insight.  Why ahead?  Because if Xanga were my sandbox, I would have had the spammers blocked a few days after my last post rather, as is seen above, months later.  Still, I have to credit John and the XangaTeam for this move.  Surely, blocking these spammers will significantly decrease Xanga's traffic ratings - a stat very obvious to advertisers looking to Xanga as a prospective platform.  By the way, while some of the spammers seemed to have slowed down, the most prolific, alexhormand.xanga.com is still running amok though not showing up on RecentUpdates. 

In any case, even as Xanga fades, I'll look ahead for it as I can.  After all, my goal is to post the very last post on Xanga before the book is closed. 

Back to what's happening...

Xanga traffic stats, it appears, are converging with Habbo.com for oblivion. Habbo who?  (Don't be Xangacentric, peeps on Habbo probably respond 'Xanga who?' , too.)

You can see the converging similarities here: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/xanga.com+habbo.com

Also, another good index of current popularity is not "online membership" the exaggerated claims for which can vary wildly, but online hits for news about the site.  Searching Google News for stories about various soical networking sites produces the following current hit list:

XANGA (not) in the news!

Of course, this lack of news presence for Xanga could rapidly swell to a peak if it were discovered that an Al-Qaeda plot to nuke New York was uncovered on obscure Xanga Private posts or if a cult of lemonade drinkers in the Carribean were all discovered murdered/suicided and each was wearing a Xanga T-shirt.    Ah, if only Xanga had actually opened that merchandise store it was exploring about 6 years ago!