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Comment by tx | Hacker News Reader

He complains about shitty over-hyped products that can be easily copied by a 14-year old over a weekend. He complains about sea of companies that make stuff that nobody wants because nobody is paying for it.

One thing for sure: over half of "products" announced on TechCrunch is less work than a typical graduate CS class project at UT (Texas).

Downmod me all you want, but Twitter is a joke. And FaceBook is not a "six billion dollar company". And "millions of users" who are not paying for your services do not translate into sustainable business just because of the "millions" word.

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You gotta give them credit for scaling and marketing themselves.

It reminds me of an urban legend I heard about a Porsche dealer who held a "buy one car, get another free" promotion, thinking he'd make it up on volume.

People who introduce the crufty products that the author rightly complains about focus too much on short term trends. Two prescriptions that help: 1) Read "Fooled By Randomness". 2) Avoid TechCrunch et al. like the plague.

tell that to YouTube, del.icio.us, flickr

Nothing of what I have written above applies to these 3. Neither can be written by a 14 year old over a weekend, YouTube is a lot of tech to handle. Flickr never nad problems with users paying for their services.

Finally, del.icio.us does not even belong to a group of companies this thread is all about (over-hyped startups with venture millions, producing crap) - it was a personal part-time pet project of a guy who didn't live in the Valley, didn't ask for millions for coding it. He wasn't even a professional programmer as far as I know.

In my view, you can be either a technology company (YouTube) or a revenue company (MySpace). Or both (Google).

Overwhelming number of Web 2.0 startups are neither.

Twitter is a joke. And FaceBook is not a "six billion dollar company". And "millions of users" who are not paying for your services do not translate into sustainable business just because of the "millions" word.

Revenue is revenue. I don't know who's saying Facebook is worth $6 billion, and I think it's overhyped too, but I'll bet Facebook is cashflow positive. Twitter's a joke? If it never becomes more than it is, then quite possibly. But perhaps its engineers plan for more than what it is today. And quite possibly, surrounding technology (cell phones, what-have-you) will advance in ways that will make what Twitter is suggesting more interesting.

Overhyping != a bubble. Companies making stuff no one wants != a bubble.

A "bubble" refers to a stock market bubble. We are not in a stock market bubble. If startups make things people don't want, then they may fail. Or better, they'll learn from their mistakes, improve themselves, and make things people want.

Bubbles don't require a "stock market", only a market and some sort of insulation from bad choices for a while.

I have to heartily disagree. A bubble is something that can pop (hence the analogy). There is nothing in this current situation that can pop. You don't need VC or angels. If you fail, you can always give up and go get a job.

The market could crash, but the state of the stock market is wholly unrelated to the state of the internet industry at this here particular time.

Are you disagreeing? I wasn't saying that the current situation is or isn't a bubble (I'll only know that in retrospect... :]); rather, I was saying that bubbles can form in markets other than stock markets. One of the most famous was the tulip bubble, in which the involvement of stock markets lagged the formation of the bubble by some time.

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