The Portable Freeware Collection Forums

Poll notes:

• See the nominations post for some background on this poll. Since the site has a limit of 10 poll selection options, I went with anything that got more than one nomination.
• Voting closes on the 3rd just in case anyone was on vacation through the new year.

---

2014 Winner: HDDB

It would be better if the poll allowed for 2 or more choices. I formally ran a SM forum and sometimes created polls using the default poll feature to enable multiple choices. If that's is not possible on phpBB, then maybe one or more additional polls could be added to enable users to make a 1st choice, 2nd choice, etc?

11 votes?

I would balance the fact that only 12 people voted by the fact that all of them were software people, so that's a compliment on it's own. The author has been contacted.

Thanks everyone for participating. If nothing else, there's a few programs I'm going to take another look at now.

Just returned to this poll since it started.

12 people? I guess quality is better than quantity

I am Baas wrote:11 votes?

haha, thats what i thought. is there any way to increase the traffic on this site or is the pool of people interested in portable so small that anyone interested already knows about TPFC?

@bzl333
Most people in general don't know portable software exists or why they matter. The majority don't even know where their application settings are stored. Even if they did know what it is, they probably just think it's only software you can put on your USB drive and not something that can replace installed software. If more people knew about the neat advantages like if I put all my portable software in a separate partition or drive I can reformat my OS and still have my apps and settings intact then maybe it could be popular and preferred.

I think the problem is there's no way you can let the masses know about it unless you plaster ads all over the internet praising the glory of portable apps. That will never happen so it's gonna be something only techies care about.

If anyone's curious on how I got into portable apps though... I still have this old mozillazine thread bookmarked and its how I discovered JHallers site over a decade ago. http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=233313

This got me asking myself. How does one discover or know about portable apps? I guess for me I just wanted to know more about how firefox worked. Browsed a firefox related forum and just happened to stumble into it. Lucky me.

Ditto. Another aspect of it could be the high ratio of lurkers to active users here at TPFC...

If more people knew about the neat advantages like if I put all my portable software in a separate partition or drive I can reformat my OS and still have my apps and settings intact then maybe it could be popular and preferred.

yeah, this is what i do too.

bzl333 wrote: ... is the pool of people interested in portable so small that anyone interested already knows about TPFC?

I definitely don't mind that the active user set is a small group.  It feels like people care and that they feel a part of a community.

bzl333 wrote:is there any way to increase the traffic on this site ...?

Well we're certainly not obscure.  Many programs I've done searches for come up with portablefreeware.com in the 1st or 2nd page of Google rankings.  Just drawing from the programs mentioned in this thread: 1st page: Anuran freeware, UnityPDF, and WinCompose. 2nd page: HDDB, LiceCAP, PhotoDemon, 3D Youtube Downloader, and 7+ Taskbar Tweaker. So this is far from a dark corner of the web.

Still, this is just another reminder to do something with the PortableFreeware introduction I put together.  I'd also really like to do a video intro at some point in the future.  So often I'm asking devs to come up with a video, I really need to get on board with that.

webfork wrote:

bzl333 wrote: ... is the pool of people interested in portable so small that anyone interested already knows about TPFC?

I definitely don't mind that the active user set is a small group.  It feels like people care and that they feel a part of a community.

i'd like to see more users here if it were possible - e.g. prob leads to better forum discussions, more comments and ratings on the program pages etc.

webfork wrote:

bzl333 wrote:is there any way to increase the traffic on this site ...?

Well we're certainly not obscure.  Many programs I've done searches for come up with portablefreeware.com in the 1st or 2nd page of Google rankings.  Just drawing from the programs mentioned in this thread: 1st page: Anuran freeware, UnityPDF, and WinCompose. 2nd page: HDDB, LiceCAP, PhotoDemon, 3D Youtube Downloader, and 7+ Taskbar Tweaker. So this is far from a dark corner of the web.

really should be a first page result for any program + "portable" though. what else is there other than portableapps.com and the winpenpack stuff? (TPFC is the best imo) btw i was looking at site traffic for these kind of sites and i think that winpenpack supposedly worth much more than the others, roughly $1 million iirc. not sure how accurate the estimating website was though.

bzl333 wrote:i think that winpenpack supposedly worth much more than the others, roughly $1 million iirc. not sure how accurate the estimating website was though.

Wait, how is that worth a million?

webfork wrote:

bzl333 wrote:i think that winpenpack supposedly worth much more than the others, roughly $1 million iirc. not sure how accurate the estimating website was though.

Wait, how is that worth a million?

nah, maybe thats not the one. i went to a site, i thought it was cubestat but app not. it listed related sites to portablefreeware.com and one of them was listed at about $1 mil. i see portableapps.com as worth $500k on cubestat and i guess i could see that.

bzl333 wrote:nah, maybe thats not the one. i went to a site, i thought it was cubestat but app not. it listed related sites to portablefreeware.com and one of them was listed at about $1 mil. i see portableapps.com as worth $500k on cubestat and i guess i could see that.

For the curious, cubestat lists the following values:

PortableApps.com: $500,194.96
PortableFreeware.com: $78,532.67
WinPenPack.com: $11,531.70

It figures it out based on Alexa rank (which is an estimate of traffic), Quantcast (which is an estimate of traffic though can be more exact for sites which sign up for it), Google Pagerank (a rank of the quality and importance of a page) and a few other factors. Based on that, it figures out how much it should make in ad revenue per day. And based on that, it figures out a value of the website... I think it uses about 3.5 years of estimated ad revenue to determine the value of the property. While interesting to look at, it's inaccurate to say the least. Especially since sites like PortableApps.com purposely push ads lower and out of the way to keep them less intrusive for our users (we have no graphical ads "above the fold" and no banner ad across the top of the page). This affects ad revenue negatively quite a bit.

i think it was actually lupopensuite.com or .org and the site listed both iirc. i'm guessing neither of those is worth any more then winpenpack though so the value calculating website must have been wrong.