Wow! There are a lot of products

January 24th, 2006 - Perhaps you've noticed the total product count rising on our home page. When you start a ProductWiki one of the first things you try to do is estimate how many products you might have listed in it. Well, the answer is........

42

The only problem is that we haven't figured out how many zeros to put afterwards. We've been thinking it's somewhere in the range of 4-6. So how do we get there? Well, if we have 1000 people adding 6-7 products a day it will take about two years to get to 4.2 million products. Now, how do you get 1000 people to add 6-7 products a day?

Having just asked that rhetorical question; we are trying to make ProductWiki as useful as possible at all product counts. Right now we have 2300+ products and that has proven to be surprisingly useful. We want to create islands of comprehensiveness rather than trying to get the whole thing done right away. For example, if you are looking for toy robots or high-end turntables we do a pretty good job already.

From working on the wiki for 2 months now it's obvious that you have to take it in small steps. Nevermind that we need to grow 1000X to be comprehensive, but focus on the scooters, headphones, basketball shoes, chainsaws, televisions, and board games of the world and somebody, somewhere will find it useful. After all, the internet is a big place.