Neither this hub is a comprehensive review, nor a detailed analysis of descriptive or numerical nature but a brief overview of the hubpages, and, by and large, reflects my own views of different features of the hubpages, activities of hubbers (called hubtivity) and social/bussiness obligations of a site and its success and failures in compliance of the same. A lot has already been written about hubpages. I think the best thing is to start with sign up page of hubpage.Start page of the site holds the key of its enormous success.

1. Site gives freedom to its writers to publish web articles on anything as per their likings

2. Anyone with or without computer programming knowledge can create a webpage very quickly and easily

3. Authors can make lot of money when visitors click on the ads displayed on webpages created by authors

The design of the sign up page is excellent and matter shown has been choosen with equal brilliance but I'll admit that each claim, made at "sign up" page by Hubpages, is valid. In all probailitiy, the secret of the success of Hubpages is hidden somewhere behind some of the sub-headings of this page.

Publish online with easy, non-techie tools: Its true. you need not be an expert in HTML Even if you are a computer literate, you can publish here with ease.

Be widely read: Very true. Pages published at hubpages get indexed by google within few hours. Hence, hubpages is not making any tall claims here.

Create ongoing royalty: Very true. You earn money here if you have affiliate accounts with Google, eBay and Amazon and Kontera. Other way of earning money is referring people to hubpages for signing up as a writer. Any traffic directed by the hubber results in some earning to hubber.

The only component of this page that does not fit to my taste is the red color of the "Start a new hub" arrow. But this is my personal view and design and layout of the pages is the sole choice of the HP. I started a thread in the Forum to seek the opinion of others. Anyone intersted in deliberations may click the highlighted link.

An overview of salient Hubpage features:

1. Statistics

Although this feature is available at all social networking and blog sites, such an easy comparison of page views for a day, a month or an week is not easily possible on other sites. I'll appreciate the designer (perhaps he is pauldeeds or may a team work, I am not sure) of this site who has designed this page using all the wits. This page shows number of visitors to each hub on per day, per week and per month basis. This develop a passion in old as well as new hubbers to divert more traffic to their hubs. Most funny thing about this page is traffic signals (red arrows for rising traffic & blue arrows for decline in traffic). When a hubber opens this page and finds red arrows but the utmost surprise to find is the number of page views. Sometimes there are several red arrows but page vies are just few, say sometimes 2 or 3. This actually happens due to comparison with week's traffic.

2. Traffic sources

This feature acts as stimulant to hubbers. They are always curious to see the sources of traffic and wait eagerly to get traffic from all 30 sites this page is capable of exhibiting. This also compels hubbers to get more traffic from various sources.

3. Comments

This feature is useful to get feedback about the hub. The best thing about the comments feature is that you can control the spammer . The ability to moderate comments helps a lot to moderate the comments across the hubs.

4. Groups

This feature to me appears like "Defragmenter" of system tools in Windows. Even then its useful to hubbers who never link their hubs.

5. Requests

Purpose of requests feature is to solicit some good ideas on the basis of that some good hubs may be produced. Earlier this feature has been overused by few hubbers to improve their hubber score by making some good and some silly requests.This issue has been raised several times in the forum and as a result of it now requests are moderated by HP staff and to some extent this feature is being used for good purpose.

6. My profile

Profile feature is the most useful and important feature of the site. Hubs shown under Latest, Hot and Best for individual hubber on hubber's profile page provides an idea of the hubber's hubtivity and links to all hubs. This is just like the site map as well as home page of the individual hubbers. This page shows hubbers' individual score, number of hubs published, hubtitvity, number of fans and fan mail etc. This page is well designed and includes everything it must have.

Main Menu

It includes several tabs like "Hub", "Hubbers", "Requests"., "Topics", "Forums" and "Hubtivity: Of these Topics and Hubtivity are just fillers in my opinion. Hubs are categorized into 1. Hot, 2. Best and 3. Latest Hubs. I will just point out here that hot hubs may be better further categorized using different themes and topics. Majority of the hubs shown under hot hubs are picture galleries and some really hot hubs never find a place here. I do agree with the stooge 's views expressed in the hub

Online photo galleries on Hubpages are overshadowing serious writers

I am reproducing a statement from stooge's hub here:

"I was searching for some good and creative hubs today, but the first ten search pages of hot hubs were full of these photo galleries trying to attract traffic by sensationalizing the sanity of a reader".

I am not averse to the idea of publishing such hubs but these hubs need to be placed under a different group in the hot hubs. I am leaving this discussion here and will return to it later on.

One more addition worth inclusion of could be the Oldest hubs that are still capable of pulling visitors. Best hubs and latest hubs category is appropriate and need not any improvement.

Forums

Categorization is fine and it covers all the aspects. There are several checks and bounds to let it function for the purpose it has been created.This is a good place to know the changes made by the site and help extended to new hubbers by HP staff and senior hubbers. Volume of posts (about 63000 posts covering 5300 topics) shows the importance of this feature to hubbers and hubpages. I found it most useful. However, there is a breed of hubbers who always try to support the site whenever any change is suggested in the existing structure of the site. Perhaps this is done to show their loyalty to site. However, they forget that all the hubbers treat the site as a family and whatever suggestions are made for change, these are to benefit the site. I may be wrong also but I have noticed this happening several time.

There are some threads in the Forum accusing few hubbers to use for promoting their own hubs. Usually such attempts of promoting hubs are thwarted by fellow hubbers. However, few shrewed hubbers succeed in their attempts when they make indirect references without using their hub's URL. It's not nice to name anyone.

Otherwise, all the hubbers are very decent here and indecent things are not tolerated by anyone.

Few words about new features:

The hubpages team always keep updating features of hubpages. There have been some new additions after I published this hub.

Categories: This feature attempts to categorize hubs under different main and sub-categories. One can understand that this is not a simple task to achieve its objectives. It will require more attempts to achieve perfection as there are several hubs that don't fit into any category but it will be injustice to hubpage team to blame them for such a deficiency as it may take years to find a proper category for each hub.

Hub mob topics: I couldn't participate in the hub mob due to shortage of time but I think this has helped to drive more traffic to hubpages and improve search engine rankings of hubpages as well as hubs being published as participatory hubs.

Broken link: This is a very useful feature. However, it has some drawbacks. On several occassions it shows live links as broken links for the reason that a linked site at the time of testing a link may be down but this feature fails to update it.

Copied hub: The newly added feature helps a hubber to know if a hub has been copied by other site. However, there are several complications in taking action against the sites who are stealing content from hubpages. Making enemies on the net by complaining  may cost heavily to complaniant.

About Founders of Hubpages & Staff

According to my little knowledge, Hubpages are maintained and operated by a small team. However, functioning of site and promptness to address problems by the Hubpages staffs shows that this is an excellent team who never tires working for improvement of the site and never forget their duty to protect the interests of the hubbers. I'll fail to do justice if I do not mention the name of Maddie Ruud here who has recently joined as moderator. She is herself a top hubber and discharges her duties with full devotion. All my appreciation goes to site owners for their good work. Its not a joke to manage 95K hubs and interact and take care of 272151 hubbers. My intention is not to reproduce all the information here but anyone interested in the history of hubpages may read the hub by sunseven titled "History of HubPages". Darkside has provided all important links in the hub titled "about the habpages". Atleast a mention of founders of Hubpages and a brief introduction will not be out of place in my opinion.

About Hubs & Hubbers:

Again I am facing the most difficult situation, Where to start from?

Hubbers of hubpages is a large community. At present, the number of total registered hubbers is around 2, 72, 000. Approx. 55 registerd users are always active online indulged in several activities at the site like creating hub, editing , publishing, browsing other hubs, participating in forum etc. Every 2 minutes or so a new hubs is published and about 600 new hubs are published a day. 15-20% of hubs end up eventually being unpublished by moderator for a violation or removed by their authors themselves. As per the statistics provided by pauldeeds recently, the number of:

Total Published Hubs: 135,242

Total Published Users: 27,629

Hubs with 1,000+ views in the last month: 1,929

Hubs with 100+ views in the last month: 13,591

Hubs with 10+ views in the last month: 61,703

The statistics cleary suggest that there are approx. 2000 hubs that are of top commercial quality. You can judge the quality of your hubs excercising with page views. If any of your hub receives more than 1000 views in a month then you can proudly say that you qualify as the best hubbers. Getting 1000 hub views in a month is really an achievement. It shows that you are a good writer and you have expertise in selecting a theme and also advertising your hub. If you can make one good quality hub then you can make hundred such hubs. Other 75000 hubs need improvement from commercial point of view as the number of page views are less than 1000. I am sure that 14,000 hubs having more than 100 page views are excellent hubs contentwise but need to be reoriented to make them commercially viable.

Page views may not be taken as sole criteria for judging the quality of hubs. Classification based on page views will give an impresseion of rating of film movies. Super hit box office movies are made considering the taste of wider range of audiences (illiterate, literate,poor, rich, youths, old people & family.etc.) Classic movies attract a different class and movies are seen by limited people). Likewise, art movies too have a small audience. Hubs also have different classes of visitors so it is difficult to judge hubs merely by number of views without a view of the hub. Hubscore may give you a good idea of the hub quality but again hub score considers number of page views as a parameter. With few modifications, these quality hubs may be converted into commercial hubs.

Hubbers:

Best Hubbers

Of the total, there are approx. 5000 hubbers who are having a hubber score of 90 or more. There are only 100 hubbers with a hubber score of more than 95. Since hubber score is a dynamic one, score keep changing. I am grouping these hubbers according to their hubber score at the time of compilation of this hub. I am introducing top 50 hubbers here grouped as G 50.

There are several great hubbers who could not make to the G-50 group here but I never treat them inferior to any of the hubbers listed in the above group. Reason for not finding a place in the above list is simply their inactivity at the site for sometime due to their engagement elsewhere or their indifference to hubber's score. I am sure they will never write a hub on movie actor and actresses (celebrities), they will never write about a product (product review to earn more money from Amazon or eBay), and they will never copy material from several sources and compile it as a top class hub. They will always use the words coming out from their heart and will never bother about the page views. There is a long list of such writers at the hubpages. I'll extend this list to G-100 in future. I am listing some of them here but this list may never be completed as lot of quality hubbers are never bothered about their hubber scores but they are extremely talented as evident from their hubs published at hubpages or elsewhere. The hubbers like inspirepub, misha, kenny wordsmith and so many others are so talented that they do not need anything like hubber score to rate them. I am getting impatient to publish this hub and it will need lot of home work on my part to complete this hub, I'll keep updating this hub with more information on best hubbers and best hubs. I seek apology from many writers who really deserve a mention here but could not get a mention here due to lack of time but I'll certainly do it in future. This hub is dynamic one like a hub or hubber score.

Last Note: Don't get carried away by the hubber's score. I was just looking hubs of a top hubber and the content was in no way can be said of high quality. However, layout and design was excellent. So, don't develop any sort of inferiority complex. Just go on writing, writing and writing.. Publish atleast one to two hubs per week. Join fan clubs of other hubbers and always leave a fanmail. Don't hestate to comment on fellow hubber's hub. Never give negative comments. If you find few weaknesses, you can point out in polite way. Always subscribe your RSS Feed and essentially submit your page to MSN, DIGG, and MIXX. Read my other hubs for improving your hubs and traffic.