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Comment by teuobk | Hacker News Reader

It's remarkable what users will "put up with" when their core needs are being met. I don't like a lot of things about CL, but does it meet my core needs? Yes; I can reach an enormous number of people with a high rate of success.

It seems to me that CL is a great example of the 80/20 rule -- but unlike most other firms, they simply didn't bother to implement the other 80% of the features.

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Still, why do those sites get so complacent? Seems to be the same with Twitter - maybe I am the only one using it via web, but they don't even have a tinyurl button or a search function for one's followers. What are they doing with their time?

I've been obsessing over this question ever since they closed out 20m in funding.

They've made pretty great improvements to the availablity and reliability. It still goes down, but not nearly as often as it did. That despite virtually doubling their traffic in the last 6 months. So my guess is they have just about everyone focusing on optimizing and scaling.

I agree though, lots more they could do including a solid oauth implementation for the api...perpetually coming soon...

I get the impression from a lot of the coverage lately that they've been working on an actual plan to make money. I'm speculating, but this could involve developers working on features or even an alternate platform conducive to that effort that wouldn't show up in the currently public-facing free system.

I saw something similar with Heroku. In fact, in the RubyConf talk, Adam Wiggins pretty much stated that they were asked by their investors to switch gears to the making money part of things. Thus, the Heroku service stayed more or less the same (and good, I might add) for a period of time up until this recent announcement that other stuff had been happening behind the scenes.

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