John "jbob" Bobowicz's Blog

java.net breaks through 150,000 member mark

As of today, Friday, 6/24/2005 @ 2:32pm EDT (19:32 GMT), java.net celebrated it's 150,000th registration when java.net user alex_lopez became a member. As of this weblog we are up to 150,007. We went from zero to 60,000 in the first year and accelerated our growth by over 150% in the 2nd year. This 150,000 member milestone is significant for several reasons:

REASON 1: Why people register

Unlike other sites that make you sign up and login for downloads or "premium content", java.net is a wide open community when everyone, including visitors, can take/read/download most things on java.net without registering or logging in. This means that people register because they want to participate, contribute, or "put back". Registered members may not reflect active contributors, but it certainly represents people that want to make sure they can contribute.

So, what does registration get you? The ability to:

• Blog and comment on java.net weblogs.
• Write to java.net forums.
• Join java.net projects and request contributing roles.
• Start your own java.net projects
• Create a personal page and profile on our People Wiki
• Leave your mark in the Javapedia
• Join the java.net Partner Network
• More closely track and participate in cool java.net projects like Glassfish, Mustang, and Looking Glass, and JSRs

This is not a complete list, but you get the idea. Registration is free and without obligation, but the benefits keep growing.

REASON 2: Participation breeds participation

The more cool communities, projects, bloggers, articles, discussions, and people that are found on java.net, the more java.net becomes attractive, interesting and valuable to Java developers. Interesting things and people attract other interesting things and people. It's a wonderful cycle when it's growing.

REASON 3: Cool features

Since we launched, two years ago, java.net has strived to provide all of the tools and functionality to enrich the experience of those developing in Java:

• Complete collaborative development tools and personal project spaces that each project enjoys.
• State of the art collaboration tools like weblogs and wikis
• RSS feeds for almost every feature or page on java.net
• Unique creations like the Javapedia, Help Wanted Wiki, and People Wiki
• Integrated Safari Bookshelf
• Upcoming java.net plug-ins for Netbeans
• Upcoming runtime environment for Java Enterprise projects.

REASON 4: Diversity

With Java as the common thread, java.net has an amazingly broad and diversified constituency, including:

• 19 Communities representing many of the places and ways Java is being used.
• Over 115 Java Users Groups host on java.net and from all around the Globe.
• Over 38 Different countries represented.
• Hosted projects in many different (spoken) languages. On java.net, Java is our preferred language!

There are many other reasons, but all of this points to the awesome people that make up this community. A big thanks to all of the members, project owners, community leaders, JUGS, Partners, Bloggers, Board Members, and the entire java.net Management team for making java.net the coolest place in the Java Universe!

See you at Java One!

Thanks for reading.

-jbob

Comments

• Do you have statistics of user activity? How many of those 150.000 have logged on over the last month or even 6 months? How about the section that starts with "fu" letters? Do you really want those 7 nicknames?

  Posted by: kirillcool on June 25, 2005 at 02:02 AM

• I know there is the ability to get statistic I just don't know how easy or automated it is. When I was the Community Manager last year, I used to write a monthly blog that served as a monthly report to the community. I used to also send it out to our Advisory Board and Fairness Board. I'm assuming that isn't being done anymore since I haven't seen it. It used to include stats that I thought were interesting and solicited feedback each month on if other stats would be better, etc. We did start posting some monthly project statistics on the home page this year.

  The whole topic of how we should measure the health, activity level, etc of java.net as a whole and of individual communities and projects has been something I've been trying to get traction on. My guess is that it will be a combination of stats aggregated from several different places. We just need to find the recipe. Hopefully we can start looking into that after JavaOne. To that end, I am going to write a blog on that topic as a conversation starter because I'd really like to hear from the community what they look for in stats and what they feel is important to track.

  Lastly, the registration process is completely automated and I don't know if there are any filters on words or phrases. Based on how easy it is to get past spam filters, I not sure how feasible it is. Like all other unedited content (News, Articles, Events all go through editorial review), members can report to the feedback alias anything they find offensive and the java.net team will investigate.

  Now that you've brought up that particular part of our member list, I'll look into it.

  Posted by: jbob on June 25, 2005 at 09:20 AM

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