I'm testing the OpenX hosted solution out right now on a site with some decent ad impression requirements, and so far I'm not convinced its a viable alternative to Google's Admanager (now known as Doubleclick for publishers).

We're only using one single position right now, a custom size, delivering about 135k impressions a day (all told the site has many positions that require an aggregate total of over a million ad impressions a day), and I'm noticing that delivery is not always smooth.  Sometimes I get broken ads, sometimes the space is empty.  This is not a user error, it is definitely an unreliable ad delivery situation.

What's worse, is that the stats system is constantly failing to load, with dreaded server errors.  In the past 3 days I've been trying to access stats with only 10% of my attempts working.  This from a company set to expand to Japan today?  Their support forums have users who are complaining about problems with no one responding.

Truly I want OpenX to succeed, the PhpAds platform it evolved from has been in use for over a decade on many sites, including some of my own.  However, right now the service has left alot to be desired in terms of reliability - I can't get stats to work on a measly 135k impressions a day, what happens if I need to deliver a million, or 2 million impressions a day?  Doubleclick for publishers is EASILY handling this volume right now with no problems for me.


Has anyone else got some positive things to say about the OpenX hosted solution?

Apparently Google is working on yet another social network to compete against Facebook.  Previous attempts with Orkut and Buzz failed to gain any significant traction and Facebook continues to make strategic decisions that entrench it more and more as a power to be reckoned with.  Some are as bold as to say that Search is "over" and social marketing and realtime search (a la Twitter) are the new paradigms moving forward.

I think one reason Google has failed to really break into this space so far has to do with both Facebook's critical mass and Google's lack of a coordinated push into the space (or maybe it was never a priority and they haven't even really tried yet :P).  Facebook is a powerful social platform based on relationships, and Google is a collection of many services, some which enable collaboration, but lack a compelling personal and  friendship element.

Google still has a very strong chance to turn it around and create a significant social network if it can come up with a coordinated strategy.   There are still a number of users who are unwilling or unable to use Facebook, and there are a number of users who are just hanging on the edge, willing to try something else.  If Google made the perfect alternative with just the right balance of social and networking features, it might turn out to surprise the naysayers.

Consider the following things Google can draw upon:

1. A massive network of Android devices whose owners are constantly in touch with friends and relatives, a platform growing by 1.4million devices a week
2. a huge number of Gmail users who already manage contacts, both personal and business
3. a collaborative document system
4. an absolutely mammoth user reach via Google search and Adsense, that happens to also give them huge profiling capabilities of a large proportion of web users.
5. A news platform in Google News that is still highly sought after
6. a HUGE network of publishers and sites that run Adsense and already rely on Google for traffic, every single such publisher already has a Google account.
7. Arguably the defacto destination for public video content on the web.

The basic picture I'm seeing is that Google's got a tremendously broad reach as far as users who already have Google accounts, and this may allow them to overcome the dreaded registration barrier to entry other networks are faced with.

How Google can drive adoption:

• How easily could Google convince websites to adopt their own variant of "Google Connect"?  As a web publisher myself, I'd support it if it was made properly.
• How easily can Google encourage "Google Like" buttons?  Depending on what they do, it can happen overnight (what if Google Like buttons influenced SERPs , for instance, even at some miniscule level balanced for gaming, who could risk not using them?)
• What would happen if the social networking capabilities that Google offers spanned across all their properties to some degree (and yet remains non-invasive)?

In fact, if done right, Google can have its users using its social network without them even really thinking of it as a social network.  Maybe they don't even need to make a social network, but instead keep integrating and coordinating deeper social features into their entire portfolio of services.  I'm not arguing that Google's social network is the next big thing to happen in social networking.  I'm saying Google has a lot they can draw upon to make it succeed where others may not.  Unfortunately, as I heard repeated by many recently at GrowConf 2010, success is sometimes a mix of doing all the right things and just plain having a large dose of dumb luck.

Sometime in 2008, around Wordpress 2.6 or so, the Wordpress team made an update to "fix" a bug with how "Read More" works in the RSS feeds.  Apparently the "Read More" feature was not intended to work in RSS feeds when you chose to show full posts in feeds (Settings > Reading > For each article in a feed, show > Full text).  Some users seemed to really like this "fix" but for TalkAndroid it was a nuissance because sites were using our RSS feed to reproduce our entire content on their own pages and the "Read More" tag was useful for splitting up our more original content.


After many hours of tooling around I found a reference to Customizing Read More and this handy post here which mentions enabling the "Read More" on pages aside from the main page of your blog.  Even those two pages were not enough.  I had to track down exactly where the RSS pages were and then hack them specifically to make it work.  Here's how to do it:

1. Look for the wp-includes/feed-rss2.php and wp-includes/feed-rss.php scripts in your Wordpress folder
2. Look for code that looks like "<content:encoded><![CDATA[<?php the_excerpt_rss() ?>]]></content:encoded>" and replace it with: "<content:encoded><![CDATA[<?php the_content('<strong>Read More...</strong>'); ?>]]></content:encoded>"
3. Add <?php $more = false; ?> right before the content encode portion of the RSS files.  This part is necessary because the the_post() function sets $more to 1 and this prevents the Read More from working.

The final code looks something like this: