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Comment by thomasptacek | Hacker News Reader

Why is this interesting?

It seems like a relaunch of Infogami.com, but with a really clever entry point. Infogami had a couple of cool ideas, like "we'll release one new feature every day" and optional commercials (support us if you want). I liked Infogami, but I stopped using it when Aaron stopped doing any development on it.

I guess I never really understood Infogami either. What's the market opportunity for Wikipedia without any of the content, controls, or attention? If it's a blogging tool, why is it better than Typepad, Blogger, or Wordpress? I'm not trying to be a jerk, I'd just really like someone to give me their take on why this is a good business idea, and how it could possibly be defensible.

The "feature-a-day" thing was a clever marketing idea; it did keep me coming back. But where was it going? Where is this going?

It just makes life easy to have a website without having to do anything else. It's a central place where you can put up stuff and let people see it. No hosting, no payment and its simple. It's nifty for many applications: its an open wiki for anything.

You mean like... Writeboard? An application so simple that even 37 "We'll Charge You $100 For A Calendar Plugged Into An Address Book" Signals gives away for free? I wonder why Google doesn't have something just like this already... oh, wait, they do.

I think Aaron's evil plot was to use machine learning to provide an automated friend-of-a-friend introduction service based on what you wrote on your infogami page. I'm pretty sure he posted about it somewhere - I remember because I had the same idea. Maybe this is a new platform for that idea.

I always wonder about google and that - gmail was (and still is I think) spread by sending invites. So there is the FOAF angle there as well - and the same accounts are used in all their apps not just email. Mix in search history (if you use it - which I don't) and that is just frightening.

In the first place it shows how user registration should look like.

You mean, like Mediawiki?

Have you tried jottit? I can't imagine anything simpler than that, I mean the registration process. Although the idea itself is probably not new.

claims-redemption registration isn't effective for a majority of the sites. when security is a prerequisite for your application, this isn't the way to go.

security is likely not a serious prerequisite to the target demographic here

I don't get it. Can you really "win" with an application just by making registration easier? I know the "every field, half your users" rule, but... is there anything more to this application?

Here are my observations.

It's clean

A demonstration of what the site does happens in one click.

The editing view is responsive and fun to play with.

Saying the user registration is good speaks volumes :) No real product or reason to use it, but at least it's easy to sign up!

Because it is probably the easiest site to test out that I've encountered. I've never demoed a site and had it be so easy to get up and running. It should be a model in user interface.

The reason it's interesting here is that it was partially made by a well known y-combinator person (who also worked on reddit).

I'm not being clear. What does this site actually do? All I saw it do was echo the text I entered back at me, and store it the equivalent of a tinyurl.

It can password protect it, and you can link things from page to page. Some of the best sites don't do anything "impressive", really...

For example?

Reddit, LiveJournal, FaceBook?

You can criticise many aspects of Facebook... but it does a lot of impressive things.

Actually? I sort of think that facebook's impressiveness is in its ability to scale the features so nicely.

I don't think there are any features on facebook that couldn't be made by your average ycombinator news reader (they might be slow as all hell, but I bet most of us could create working demos of most features).

Facebook does a lot of almost invisible but extremely smart things. Two examples: when you specify the type of relationship when adding a friend, Facebook uses the info to decide how much information to present about the person in your news feed. Or when two people list themselves as being in a relationship, Facebook will show the most recent picture of the two together (if such a picture exists, and privacy permissions permit it in your case).

Nothing fancy. Just extremely well thought out.

Wow. I can't remember ever seeing a negative nostrademons comment. Obviously that's not earth shattering but it is feeling like downvoting is more generally on the rise around here.

easy to test because it doesn't do much...

Neither did the first iPod.

Edit: Okay, okay, sheesh, I'm not insulting it. I meant that it had one feature, which was to play music. It did exactly what it needed to do and no more. That's all I'm saying.

You mean besides fitting ten CD cases worth of music into something that fit in your pocket? What a silly argument.

We're talking focus. The iPod wasn't especially innovative, but it was extremely focused on exactly one thing: playing music. And that focus was executed perfectly.

Having an extremely narrow focus isn't a bad thing, so to use the statement "it doesn't do much" to suggest that Jottit a bad product seems weak.

and the iPod was the first hard drive based MP3 player to use the new 1.8" hard drive.

All due respect to aaronsw, but, the iPod's "one feature" was EXTREMELY FUCKING IMPRESSIVE. Help me understand what's impressive about this site, other than that it still has me talking about it hours after its launch?

I said exactly one thing: Suggesting "a product has a narrow focus" == "a product is bad" is lame. I didn't compare Jottit to the iPod, I compared the number of features. There's a subtle difference.

Also, sorry for the 'hominem, but it's people like you that turned Reddit into Digg. Keep your fucking language clean, your caps lock off, and your rhetorical questions to yourself, or get out. This is not Slashdot. It's really sad that you act like a total troll since you're an excellent hacker, judging by http://www.matasano.com/log/thomas-ptacek

I know you have more to contribute to News.YC than your ego and your snarky remarks. Try harder.

Grow up. You compared Jottit to the iPod. Ludicrous.

Why can't we all just get along?

This argument is about nothing. Jottit doesn't have to be the greatest thing since the iPod. Aaron doesn't need the money and he wanted to do something with his code wizardry. Here we are.

I apologize.

One of the lessons of the net so far is that there's always opportunity in making web authoring & self-expression easier: HTML, FrontPage, Geocities, blogs, wikis, friend-linked profile pages. Jottit looks like another point on that curve.

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