5 Things that will Kill your Startup [in 2008]

re: Web 2.0 being out of style, perhaps some of the trendy things like gradients, etc. may have fallen out of fashion, but, IMO, simple interfaces will never fall out of fashion.

For the last ten years, I've programmed user interfaces for folks with high school educations to run complex chemical plants and refineries, and I've seen that an easy-to-understand interface has at least as much importance as the algorithms that underly the interface.

"but you can learn from the backlash seen from YouTube and Facebook users who felt cheated when the sites built a loyal userbase, got bought out and suddenly the user experience drops in favour of advertising revenue."

I think ads are lame. Power users block them with AdBlock Plus, anyway, so if you cater to savvy users you'll get shit clickthrough rates and annoy everyone else.

Are people making $40-100k a year really too cheap to pay $9/month for something they use everyday?

It seems to me that the 'emerging monopolies' wouldn't kill your startup, but be a good thing, as getting bought seems to be a worthwhile goal.

Nice article. Found it refreshing and forwarding looking, without trying to be too futuristic.

Don't use the dollar?

I'm not sure what he's getting at. Use a payment service and quote in whatever currency the use prefers. It's not like you have to do your own currency exchange or anything -- all that stuff can easily be handled.

Also the "there won't be a Web 3.0. Web 3.0 is a Web 2.0 meme" seems a little flip. The 2.0/3.0/4.0/etc meme is from software versioning, not Web 2.0. So I imagine whatever comes along big on the web next people will naturally call Web 3.0 -- for the same reason the next big wr will probably be called WWIII. That's just the way numbers work. Of course, "Web 3.0" may never catch on, but that's a different story.