Cackle - results of the year

In October 2011, the Cackle project, unique at that time, appeared on the Internet . This was the first project in the world with 18 authorization providers, including all major Russian social networks. At the end of the year, we decided to analyze the system, collected interesting facts and statistics on social comments.

Sites

Cackle use more than 17,000 sites. On average, from 60 to 150 widgets are created per day. About 35% paid. There are only one widget, which was created on November 27, 2011. Maximum 250 - February 2, 2013.

The monthly growth dynamics can be seen on the graph: we started from 200 sites a month and grew to an increase of more than 2000 sites. Monthly growth is 12-15%:


It is interesting to note that quite a few widgets are registered on weekends and holidays. Apparently, people have time to do their site.

What users are authorized through

During this time, more than 800,000 unique users have left comments via Cackle. Most of them are anonymous, about 63%, the rest are social comments and SSO . The diagram below does not include anonymous comments:


Its authorization is in the lead (despite the fact that this feature is available only in the Pro account) and of course on VKontakte. I was surprised that Twitter is not among the five leaders, apparently in Russia it is not so popular.

Domain zones

Cackle service is used in more than 30 Internet zones. Today, the leaders are Russia and the CIS countries.


Somewhere in the summer of 2012, the growth of sites from Europe is rapidly picking up - these are Spain, Germany, France, Italy and England. On the chart, almost all of them make up a yellow bar.

Comments

At the moment (02.02.2013 0:54) 1 001 416 comments have been created. Every day, from 5,000 to 10,000 are published. The chart below shows monthly growth:


It is interesting to note that we received tangible growth in November 2012, when we realized the possibility of authorization and commenting on users registered on the site - SSO .

Command

4 employees are working on the project:

• Two developers: the first is front-end (javascript, html, css) and back-end (nginx, tomcat, java, postgres), the second is php, integration with various CMS, configuration of external servers (smtp)
• Technical Support Specialist
• Accountant

Technology

The main technological stack of the system: Nginx, Tomcat, Java, Spring Framework, Hibernate, PostgreSQL.
Servers:

• Main - 8 core Intel Core i7 c 32Gb memory
• Server for automatic import of comments - VPS
• Realtime stream server (long polling) - VPS
• SMTP Server - VPS

We use Hetzner as a hoster and we must pay tribute to it since more than a year of work, due to their fault, the server was unavailable for only 1.5 hours.

Other projects

In parallel, we are developing projects necessary for internal work. So a simple, easy and convenient stiker.me task tracker was created . A tracking system for collaboration in the form of boards on which stickers can be hung.


To work on Cackle, for example, we have several sharing boards - ASAP, do today, do this week, do within a month, do in a year, BUGs, Planning. Stickers, in our opinion, are the best of simple.

affiliate program

Most recently, we launched an affiliate program with very flexible partnership conditions. The company reserves 60% of the profit, affiliate reward is from 5 to 40%. Our next post will be fully devoted to this topic, so subscribe and follow the blog .

Future

Not much insider information. Very soon, we will provide functionality with which you can create almost any widget based on Cackle. For example, voting widget, Realtime chat, forum, authorization. And virtually every webmaster can do this, for this you need basic knowledge of HTML and CSS.