These ideas are intended to be fun little weekend hacks and not serious businesses right?
Figured I'd ask because I clicked hoping for something else and wondered if I was the only one that did so.
Figured I'd ask because I clicked hoping for something else and wondered if I was the only one that did so.
Would you consider the 'fun little weekend hack' called 'reddit' a serious business ?
How about optimizely ?
Gazehawk ?
Twitter ?
From tiny start-ups big companies may grow. Which one that's usually the bigger question but all of them started out reasonably small, something that three guys could probably hack out in great detail in a few weeks at best, maybe even just a weekend.
You don't have to invest so much of your ego into it.
As for Reddit, they're got serious infrastructural and financial issues, so you've used a pretty bad example there. It was by the grace of god and the success of Reddit Gold that they were even able to expand their rather pressed team recently.
Twitter isn't profitable (yet?) so far as I know.
Don't know anything about the other two.
If you're going to get uppity with someone about the perception of your semi-regularly posted spaghetti-to-wall ideas, and counter with something with examples like that, you'd be better served by using profitable examples if you think profit is some kind of universal validation for them. (Again, I can't comment on the other two. No idea.)
Which is what I was originally wondering anyway, if they were intended to be services/sites with a profit motive, or something you thought would be fun hacks.
I consider both to be valuable things to share with other people, and my last collaboration was in fact, just a fun weekend hack. I enjoyed it greatly and would love to find an idea for something similar soon were it not for the book I am working on.
Anyway, you came off as a bit on edge there when no offense was intended and I'm a bit shocked as I'd expect better of you from what I'd previously seen in your contributions to the community. I'm not perfect by any means and in fact angle for devil-side advocacy, but I never mean to hurt feelings in the process.
If I offended you, I apologize. I do in fact appreciate what you share with us, even if bending over backwards with appreciation wasn't my first conversational priority.
I'm getting tea and logging off until I get some hacking done.
Cheers.
Lots of serious businesses are not currently profitable and lots of unserious businesses are (the Cheezburger network of sites pulls in something like 7 figures).
From the steam engine to the lightbulb to google it starts off with just a half-formed malleable idea.
Adsense is what makes google profitable (context sensitive ads), not search.
The end game is for applications themselves to use the expanded space. No windows, no scrolling. You open a document and it just opens right there, along with some UI to edit it. I'm sure it would need a lot of experimentation to get right. And it may or may not be possible to get existing apps to work this way.
Also, how do you like HN Office Hours? Any ideas/suggestions?