Is that good etiquette?
More importantly, TrailBehind looks nice. How's it going?
Edit: Case in point. Someone downvoted this comment to 0. But I think it will come back up. I think with the growing numbers of HN, a lot of rogue voters have come along, who just like to screw around.
We do still use the TrailBehind data in our apps, and that's one of the main things that differentiates our apps against competitors. But we pivoted because there was no money in TrailBehind.
I suppose we could have tried to be more like Trails.com, but the site is pretty much a search engine, so we didn't "own" any data besides the index. We just linked through to the appropriate reports about places.
If I ever get some time, I'd love to revive and finish TrailBehind. It was my first big programming project, and it was growing, but there was just no money.
It still gets tons of visits everyday. Turn off Javascript and you'll see we did some interesting SEO stuff.
One thing I hardly see anyone do, instead of just running CPC/CPM ads, is actually sell products related to their apps. For example, considering you've already got a site with good traffic, you could create your own niche store of sorts, in which you sell products of interest to your audience. That could include your own mobile apps, other complementary apps, physical goods. You could also sell well-thought out bundles of such products, so that you are not competing with big discount sites which can sell single items for cheap. Offer people good products with convenience and awesome customer service, ride the social network craziness and you could do quite well.
* AdSense
* a home-brewed system that recommended Amazon maps/books based on the map
* ads for our apps
* ads for custom topo maps of the area in view from MyTopo (These worked the best)
We really haven't been unhappy with our decision. There's a lot of money in the mobile space, and we have even mostly pivoted away from hiking. We have our hiking apps, but we also license our mapping platform to other companies and collect royalties. We power everything from flying and boating, to hiking and wine-country apps now.
My only regret is not pivoting from TrailBehind faster!
I've no objection to people expressing their opinion in a decent manner, even if I disagree. I upvote those that I agree with and leave those that I don't.
But what happens when you have two 50 point comments? I would like to signal which person I think is winning the argument, and enshrine the best comment with the most votes, forever on the internet.
If a comment already has tons of points, it's not going to get buried. But I think it's positive if the crowd judges the merits of the arguments and tries to distinguish the best comment for future readers.
Maybe it's less appropriate here where "right" and "wrong" are often unclear. But in forums like StackOverflow, I would like people to downvote the lesser answers, even if they don't totally suck.
Just because someone disagrees with opinion it doesn't make it a valid opinion. In the thread example I gave, what if I downvoted World Lens or Quora (not that I would - they are awesome) just because I disagreed - I think it would take away from the threads purpose.