October 6, 2005
XuQa.com
XuQa.com is the latest in a wave of online communities for college-types. Initially, it appears to have many things that other web “portals” are lacking. 5 gigs of space for pictures is certainly impressive. That is, if they can deliver. So far, I haven’t seen any sign of where the money comes from to support this site. It’s certainly not cheap. Everyone loves math though, so let’s do some math…
- 5 gigs of space for each user (assuming 5,000 megs instead of 5,120)
- 100,000 users (less than the actual number)
- 500,000 gigabytes, or 500 terabytes
At the risk of a horrible flaming, let’s just grossly underestimate and assume $3 for every 4gigs. That’s $75,000. Let that fact set in while we move on.
Here’s a brief snippet from the “About XuQa” section:
XuQa.com is the illegitimate child of a few zany ideas, two months of toiling in front of shitty half-assed PC’s, a lack of consensus on a name and lots and lots of bickering.
This isn’t a big deal though. Lots of projects start this way and end up being great. Problem is, it’s currently being supported by 4 students and I don’t see any mention of a way they are paying for the site. (remember, the storage alone would be a *minimum* of $75,000, assuming they actually have the capacity to support that many users, which I’m pretty sure they don’t)
On further inspection, the site wasn’t very thoroughly tested. Not by anyone outside the group anyway. To add someone as a “crush” you only need to pass &cmd=crush to the end of the url when viewing their profile. So, to add the entire database to your crush list, you only need to do a simple loop and load that url in a popup (which I am currently doing - 861 crushes so far).
With that, I think XuQa has some potential, but it would need a lot more support. There’s some things that are interesting and new, and some things that hauntingly remind me of myspace, which I detest. If you’re a programmer yourself, go have some fun and hack what you can before they actually code it correctly. 
PS. All in good fun, of course. XuQa Team, if you’re reading this, I commend you on the current system and wish you good luck in the future. I’ll probably get bored and stop hammering your server soon enough…
October 8th, 2005 at 7:24 am
I found out about XuQa this morning when I rolled out of bed and found “Someone has a crush on you” sitting in my Inbox.
“Now why didn’t my spam filter catch that?” I thought.
October 8th, 2005 at 10:55 am
XuQa is up to no good!
I was just checking my email and was surprised to find this sitting in my spam folder:
Hello,
Somebody on XuQa.com has added you to their crush list.
Click on the link to learn more.
http://XuQa.com/joinit
Cheers,
The XuQa.com Team
If you do not wa…
October 8th, 2005 at 3:38 pm
not everyone uses their 5 gigs… in fact i’d bet 99.9% of users have less tha 10 MB’s of photos on there.
October 8th, 2005 at 3:39 pm
not everyone uses their 5 gigs… in fact i’d bet 99.9% of users have less tha 10 MB’s of photos on there.
October 11th, 2005 at 8:44 pm
I was trying to find some way to hack into xuqa to find out who exactly gave away my school e-mail address to xuqa and I found your blog. My school e-mail address is not typically available to anybody outside my school or facebook friends and xuqa friends. I’m surprised that the spam filter I had set up didn’t catch it either. I’m not sure if it was a student or something in one of my classes who gave my e-mail address away.
The photo storage sucks, because they put their “xuqa.com” tag on it.
November 28th, 2005 at 1:30 pm
Most figure that the facebook is where the 4 students nabbed their names. Look at the facebook junkies, the ones with 700 friends, and plug it to them. You know how the dominoe effect goes.