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Comment by yid | Hacker News Reader

I really don't mean to sound unpleasant, but does anyone else think that the primary goal of Greplin is to exit via Google or Facebook? From a consumer point of view, can it ever be anything more than a niche product? I'm genuinely curious...these patches are somewhat superficial, and while a nice gesture, the cynical part of me sees it as a ploy to gain cred with the people most likely to influence buyouts.

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Our goal is to become the bridge between your brain and every bit of information you own online.

We open source projects for two primary reasons:

1) Because we use lots of open source projects internally. It makes sense to reciprocate where we can.

2) There's no better place to meet great engineers than in GitHub pull requests.

you say that like it's a bad thing. why is "1. build something that would be useful to a large company, 2. prove by acquiring users that the product has real value, 3. get acquired" a bad business model? from a consumer point of view, they'll benefit when google or facebook or whoever integrates greplin's techniques.

This is completely irrelevant to the discussion, please feel free to downvote me for it:

2 things: Your account is exactly "1337" days old today, happy leet day :). Also, are you the same zem that posted on newslily a while ago? If so, you posted some really awesome stuff, thanks :)

(Sorry if I've recognized you and asked this question before, I have a terrible memory)

thanks, would never have noticed l337 day on my own :) and yeah, same zem! dropped off newslily due to having too many social networks to keep up with; nice to see it still going strong.

o/ well long-distance high five to you :).

I wouldn't really say it's still going strong, haha. Unfortunately, we never really got the traction on that that we needed to allow it to keep running by itself (Cody and I were submitting a lot of the content, which was fine, but it would have been really awesome if we didn't have to).

<sarcasm>Big surprise there, though, we were trying to compete against HN and reddit</sarcasm>

Back in November, we both started working a new project: http://thingist.com, which has been taking a lot of my time lately, so I haven't been submitting as much.

Anyway, good to see you around here, man :)

where is the "help->about" page for thingist? i can't make out whether it's competing with tumblr, twitter, or something new entirely.

didn't mean for it to sound like that...it definitely is a more interesting strategy than "let's change the world!"

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