Since uggs is a winterboot it's pretty obvious that it will be searched for in winter time. If you take this into account the graph shows a slow and steady increase in uggs searches.
Interestingly it seems that uggs are more popular in the northern hemisphere since there are not a lot of searches in what is the northern hemispheres summer and the southern hemispheres winter.
Accorindg to the theory they should have a good chance at making a valuable brand, since their growth is slow but has been increasing over the last four years.
It's a site where writers can share and promote their work. I'm well aware of the dozens of writing communities out there, but most of these sites operate in a forum or blog model, which I find rather difficult to filter good content/writers from the bad. The voting process on Lit is modeled after a Markov chain where every writer has an assigned global rank. I'm hoping the competitive nature of the site will motivate people to submit their best writings. Eventually, I'd like to make this the destination where aspiring writers post their work and get discovered.
Advice (my first writer's start-up, which shut down a few years ago, tried a similar tack): ranking writers encourages people to write easily-digestible fluff and ascend in the ranks by essentially not playing fair. You can't remove the factor of individual taste from a writing site. In fact, the best models (which is what I'm working on now) encourage such individuality.
I would second this; I don't have any experience with writing startups, but I used to post to fanfiction.net when I was younger. I quickly noticed that the stories with the most reviews and attention weren't really "stories." They were written in script form and frequently revolved anachronistic popular humor being injected into the original work.
This is one of my first Rails apps with the user profiles powered completely by Facebook Connect. I used the Facebooker (http://facebooker.rubyforge.org/) plugin, which was relatively painless to integrate into my app.
