Thursday, 27 June 2002

• To Whom It May Concern:

  The Management of Xanga Corporation International, Ltd., Inc. (a BigCo subsidiary) has been informed that some of its clients are feeling isolated, ignored and indignant. As such, we have tasked our Assistant Vice Secretary of Customer Support, Marc, to issue the following statement :

  Seriously... sorry we haven't been keeping you up to speed on all the stuff we've been doing behind the scenes here at Xangaland. The four of us (yes, it's still just Monsur, Dan, John and me) have been so busy building, programming and fixing (heh, yes we *are* fixing things when they break) that we've started to slack on keeping you all informed. So lemme give you a quick update and clarification on a couple of questions that seem to be on your minds:

  Where does all the Premium money go?

  I want to make sure you all understand this one thing: *all* of the money from Xanga Premium goes straight back into Xanga. And to be even more clear... straight to pay for the computers, servers, and hosting costs necessary to keep xanga running. In our fanatical (masochistic?) devotion to this little community, we all work without salary - we volunteer our time and efforts, just for the love of Xanga. And we're happy to do it! (though, obviously, if Xanga ever started making money - heh - none of us would object to making a little money.)   

  If you've been following some of our seemingly unrelated activities, I can totally understand why you might be asking where you're premium money has gone. But rest assured, everything that we build and launch (including all of the sister sites that notforprophet, investigative reporter extraordinaire, has uncovered for you - webcrimson, crimsonblog, crimsonzine, microcontentnews, etc.) is part of a big, crazy plan to keep *Xanga* alive and kicking.

  Xanga is the *center* of this little universe of website services, not some lonely planet on the fringes. Hah, and to be perfectly blunt, it is also the financial black hole of this universe - any money that comes anywhere near Xanga gets sucked into the void.

  To give you an idea of how much cash Xanga consumes: if growth continues at its current rate, by December 2002 (this year!) our hosting bill for Xanga.com could be as high as $25,000 per month! (Ok, nfp - there are some numbers for you to crunch. I'm sure all of your readers would love to see you translate that hosting bill into a membership & traffic estimate - I could just give you the numbers, but that'd be too easy )

  Why don't we promote Xanga more often on our other sites?

  Hahaha - that number above is part of the answer: Xanga is already growing like crazy. It just doesn't need any more help right now. In fact, whenever we do mention Xanga on other sites, or in the rare instance that Xanga actually gets a mention in the Press, the impact on our growth rates is negligible (because the rates are already so high).

  But the primary reason you won't see Xanga mentioned on those other sites (and the reason you won't find us yapping about these sites too much here on Xanga) is that they don't quite fit together in any significant way, yet.

  Right now someone who uses Xanga will probably find WebCrimson too lacking in community features to be interesting. And someone who uses WebCrimson may find Xanga too pre-fabricated, not customizable enough... or maybe even *too* rich in community features.

  Like I said above, though, all of this development is part of one big plan *focused* on keeping Xanga happy. None of those other sites costs that much to run right now, but they help us bring in more cash (through website development and consulting work) to help keep Xanga running.

  In fact, as I write this post Dan is placing an order for a new set of blazingly fast web servers for Xanga, courtesy of all of your support and other cash from Xanga's expanding world of web services

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