History of TrackMyProfile - Part One
Before I began, I must admit I don’t remember the exact sequence of the events that resulted in TrackMyProfile.com, but I do have a reasonably good memory of what went on. With that said, let’s dive into how it all started. This is Part 1 of The History of TrackMyProfile. It’s quite a long story, so I’ve decided to break it up in multiple posts. Sometime soon I’ll post a Part 2.
TrackMyProfile Is Born (albeit not with that name)
A long long time ago, from an interest in impressing someone, I created an AIM Buddy Tracker, now known as TrackMyProfile. There was no real vision, although if someone asked me at that time I’m sure I would have given them the somewhat standard story of “O, I was looking for a good buddy tracker service, and I couldn’t find one so I created my own”. That was not the least bit true. There was a great buddy tracking service already avalible. I had hosting with a company called LunarPages at the time - shared hosting - and I ran the tracker off a directory of my blog. It was a really long domain that I doubt any sane person could remember. People found the site through Google I assume. TrackMyProfile was probably not called TrackMyProfile at that time. I don’t know if I even had a name for it. It was a quite simple script with a quite simple design but I had a tough time making it since it was one of my first from-scratch PHP programming projects. Previously my only experience with PHP was modifing other scripts (like the search script on cj-design.com), and TrackMyProfile was the first real PHP script that I made. (Don’t worry, we’ve gone threw the code and improved it). I had some experience in running a website, but very little. A few years back I had gotten intrested in an online game called Runescape. I created a tip site for it, and I gained some experience in running a forum and some very simple PHP prgogramming from that. Anyway, TrackMyProfile at this time had a plain white design, with a simple one step registration process. I had created a little admin interface, to see who many users had signed up and I remember going away to CTY (Summer Camp) and calling my dad everyday so he could check how many users had signed up. It was miraculous to me at that time that someone would actually bother signing up for something I had created. The website was very small at this time. I asked my friends to sign up, but this resulted in only a moderate success. Most of them ignored my pleas to try out the tracker.
It grows! And it makes money.
The website grew. I hand’t expected it to grow the way it did, and I was excited. At some point I decided that perhaps I could try monetizing on TrackMyProfile. I signed up for Google AdSense. It was a complete failure. I made a few dollars the first day, and some more throughout the next week, but not THAT much. To be honest, very little - a few dollars that week. I eventually got “booted of AdSense”. I was quite dissapointed initally. I had high hopes for TrackMyProfile at this point. It looked like it was growing pretty fast and the ads failing were discouriging. I don’t remember when exactly I got a proper domain for TrackMyProfile, but it was probably sometime around here. I also purchased a little template (the blue one), which is what TrackMyProfile.com is using now. Anyway, I signed up with a company callled Commision Junction. They’re another ad provider but they’re a bit different from Google AdSense. Commision Junction is more of an ad marketplace. In any case, it turned out to be kind of a good thing that AdSense didn’t work out for me. I doubt I would have tried Commission Junction otherwise. By this point TrackMyProfile.com was growing quite rapidly for a small site. I added a activation process which required the users to fill out a survey. This eventually made a lot money. Sometimes around now I also talked to theMhore from buddytracker.us. He told me about how his website had grown. When he mentioned that his website was making “5 digits” I was estatic. Perhaps I thought TrackMyProfile could get somewhere around that level. It never did, but I was not dissapointed really. Initially I had guess buddytracker was making somewhere around $300 monthly. TrackMyProfile was making about $200 shortly. It went up a bit, then down a little…
TrackMyProfile Startes Making a Lot of Money and Getting a Lot Of Users - We’re Popular!
After a couple months it eventually made $600, then $700, and at some point we hit the $800s. It countinued at this level for a few months. During this time I added lots of features. I become sort of a perfectionist when it came to TrackMyProfile, and I added many many features which I doubt most have even noticed. I added a buddy hiding feature to hide buddies from the profile viewer list, a sorting mechanism, and in each of these features there were many carefully programmed deatils. The sorting feature remembered the last sort of each user, and set this as the default the next time the user viewed that profile. I added a Stats page late one night. I added post comments for the news section on TrackMyProfile.com’s website. It looked like TrackMyProfile was going uphill. We were getting users faster then ever - on some days over 100 registrations. And to be making so much money (I’m a kid remember) off this site, I was just trilled.
The Downtime, AIM Triton (6.x), SaveMyProfile
I’m not sure at this point whether that was the climax of TrackMyProfile’s earnings and user growth, or simply part of the upward climb. Hopefully it was the latter, in which the following I’m about the describe are simply challenges faced on the way up. While all this was going on, AOL was working on a new update to it’s age-old AIM client. This new release would later be called AIM Triton (it’s changed it’s name once again; now Triton is just the AIM 6.x series). AIM Triton lacked something that all our buddy trackers relied on - a sub-browser in the profile. In order to better understand exact what this “sub-browser” was I think I should explain a bit how TrackMyProfile used to work. A certain user went to our site, and obtained a link. They’d place this link in their AIM Profile and when a friend clicked on the link, magic would happen, their screen name would be tracked. It wasn’t really magic though. AIM Profiles converted “%n” to the profile viewers screen name, so we simply created a link which utilized %n. We set a certain option on the link so that the link would open in the users AIM Profile. This only worked because AOL built in a little sub-browser into the profile system, which allowed simple pages to be displayed in the profile window. AIM Triton (6.x) lacked this feature, and this combined with a few other problems nearly destroyed the whole concept of buddy tracking….and of course TrackMyProfile
Intrested? Stay tuned for Part 2 of the History of TrackMyProfile.com!
Posted in TrackMyProfile.com | No Comments »