Step 2: Wait ten years. Then, repeat step 1 with similar idea but different branding (Medium).
At this rate, we have about 6 years until Ev does step 2 for Twitter. Maybe it'll be called Tiny :)
Some companies end too early because the technology or capital wasn't there to let it get to its full potential. Also, those founders tend to be the people who understand the space the best because they're the ones with the most experience.
It helps to get re-acquired once you have all the existing connections and the acquiring company knows you're not snake oil and aren't screwing them over.
There have been multiple Google->Startup->Google loops as well, but many of those are an acquihire-as-safety-net when the too hyped startup by too eager employees falls flat on its face.
To be mean to him: Deciding to split Foursquare into Yelp-lite and a shitty social network was a terrible, terrible idea.
1. What I percieve to be excessive use of JS. You can't even load a blog post there (well, at least, couldn't last time I visited a dot-blogspot site) without an on-page spinner and a bunch of stuff apparently happening in the background.
2. The tld-redirect crap. Admitedly, I had actually thought a similar mechanism to be benefitial prior to seeing an actual implementation of it but I mean, come on, does this not annoy others? What's the advantage of that anyway? Google is capable of geographical load balancing with IP addresses alone just fine, what's the deal?
Disclaimer: These are my end-user reactions. I have never operated at the scale Blogger does so there may be reasons I am not aware of.
For me at least, I think it's much easier to keep track of places you've gone with your own reviews with swarm. And foursquare for finding new places you would want to go. I'm sure they could have built it in such a way that would only need one app, though I can't complain too much about the split.
Speaking of Blogger...what's hapened to it? Wordpress, Tumblr and Medium are perhaps the three most popular blog platforms. Blogger, however, seems to have completely fallen off the radar. If you go to blogger.com, you don't even get a landing page for the service, just a Google sign-in. This gives me the impression that Google doesn't want to promote it or encourage new sign-ups. Perhaps they don't know what to do with it? Or perhaps they'd like to retire the service but can't because of all the sites and users that currently exist?
Google bought it. RIP.
But, if anybody deserves internet funny money, it's ev. He's the most genuine and least evil founder of internet things I've seen.
> Understanding Blogger as we did at the time — as a software tool for creating and publishing web sites — we found ourselves in the race many software makers know well: Add features, get more users. Competitor adds more features, lose users. (Marketing and others factors have some effect, depending on the market. In blogging, that was minimal.)
(skipping a few paragraphs)
> Chris Dixon had a great post a while back — Come for the tool, stay for the network — describing how, unlike Twitter, some platforms started out with tool value and transitioned into network value (which, ultimately, became a much bigger part of the equation, such is the case with Instagram). We had an inkling of this and were just getting started on the network piece of Blogger when I left 10+ years ago. It’s not that Blogger immediately suffered. Its ease-of-use continued to attract users in the tens of millions for many years. (According to Compete, blogspot.com had 63M visitors just this March.) But it was a pretty big missed opportunity for Google. (Don’t worry, they’ve done fine.)
> It will not surprise you that these observations reveal a lot about what we’re trying to do with Medium. We started out by building a great tool for writing. And it’s not even the editor itself that created the main value. It was the fact that you could easily write and share a story without the setup, overhead, or commitment level of starting a blog. It’s clear that there are many more people who occasionally have valuable perspectives to share than there are people who want to be “bloggers.” These people love writing on Medium, even if they see it as just a tool to create a nice page to point people to from Twitter.
> However, that’s not the point. Or, at least, that’s not the end. In the last few months, we’ve shifted more of our attention on the product side from creating tool value to creating network value. What does this mean? Obviously, one form of that value is distribution. And there’s no doubt that something published on Medium has a higher likelihood to find an audience than the same thing published on an untrafficked island on the web.
I think that makes sense. You can use Blogger or Wordpress or whatever to create a blog, but the difficult part is getting traction. Similarly to how Github is not only a place to host your .git repo, but also a "network" for finding/distributing those repos, Medium is not only a place to host your content, but a place to find and distribute that content.
> Some companies end too early because the technology or capital wasn't there to let it get to its full potential.
Blogger is a clear case for that. If it was founded 5 years later, it could have had sharing features and been Tumblr.
Similarly, if Tumblr was founded now, it'd probably have a better comment system, cleaner design and collections. The real question is - is that enough to move the network effect over to Medium. I see Tumblr v. Medium as very similar to MySpace v. Facebook in that regard...