al_james

I think the discussion is divided between two camps:

1) Those who can't imagine the point of a messaging (or indeed, any) system that does not have all the bells and whistles you can imagine or get using another system.

2) Those that realise that most people only use a very small subset of those features, and that everything else is just a potential cause of confusion. So, offering a messaging system that "does a few things, but does them well" will be an attractive proposition for many people.

It seems that these two camps can't see each other's points of view. The author of the article seems to acknowledge 2 but keeps coming back to 1.

"more words are always good, right"

No. Less words to say the same thing are normally much better, the rest is just noise.

Actually, that would be great for facebook. Sending millions of emails per day to the outside world with a link 'XXX is already on facebook, why dont you join today' at the bottom would be priceless.

Er, what else would you want to do to the message? Or, to put it another way, what else do you think normal people do with the messages? 99.9% reply or delete. Perfect.

It would have to be a heavily optimised webmail UI. Current webmail implementations are too heavy on legacy features that normal people don't use (BCC/CC), have issues with spam ("why do good emails end up in my spam bin where as this viagra ad does not?") and light on social link and media sharing features that facebook users would expect.

True. But they will fix that with a little time.

Exactly. "PR and faffery" are the secret sauce that will make or break your business. You can have the best product in the world, but without "PR and faffery" you will never get beyond a handful of early adopters. More than that, any site that looks like it has become successful without "PR and faffery" has just done the "PR and faffery" in a subtle way so that it looks like it has not happened!

I thought that said 'Android 2.4' and got very excited!

I should imagine it wraps all values in its own flexible typed wrapper class and defines code for operations on them. This, of course, imposes quite an overhead.

This is very exciting. Will be interesting to benchmark and see what the performance is like. It would be great if you dynamically compile JS to java classes at runtime (store procedures in JS etc).

Sorry, but how on earth did this get on the first page of HN?

What is this supposed to show exactly? Google trends is not an accurate description of the popularity of these formats.

True, but as it stands, someone's ranking can be destroyed by not playing the black hat SEO game when your competitors are and allowing their crappy spam filled site to outrank you. Swings and roundabouts.

Yes that would be good. They could then look at the number of people blocking certain domains and de-weight them in the global results.

Traditionally google seem against human powered editing (as this would be), but I think as the black hat SEOs run rings around them, its needed badly.

I think it makes sense in extreme cases. For a 'real' page (e.g. with useful content and ads that are secondary to the main content) CTRs are unlikely to be that high. From experience I would say its hard to get > 10% CTR in such a site.

However, for 'spam pages' (e.g. those that have little information and ad links in primary positions) its common to have much higher CTRs. The prime examples are those sites that present AdSense links in with navigational links so its not clear you are clicking on an ad. CTRs of >50% are not uncommon.

I think you could form some kind of metric out of a) number of AdSense placements b) prominence of AdSense placements. There should be nothing against using AdSense, as long as the ads are secondary to (informative) content.

>No offense, but this is like programming 101.

Thats a bit harsh. You could have happily posted the above (useful) comment without that dig at the end.

In other news: "Don't use a spoon as a knife", "Don't use a hat as a rowing boat", "Don't use a bicycle as a flying machine". Etc...

You can test all you want, but spikes in demand can still take you down. I dont care how big your VPS is, there will be a point that it can't take anymore, and in real life, that point will probably be sooner than your testing will predict.

I repeat, infrastructure problems will kick you when you least need it.

You have a point about lock in, but there are many cloud providers that just supply hosted versions of open source software (amazon RDS, mongo HQ) so you can still use the cloud, but have the ability to take your data away with you.

Unfortunately, the periods when you need extra power because your 'kick ass application' has had some excellent publicity will enviably occur in the middle of the night, or when something else is on your plate forcing you to divert technical resources when you can spare them the least.

Infrastructure issues kick you when you are down.

'The cloud' is still in its infancy, but the goal is to let you sleep soundly at night. Its getting there, but has some distance still to go.

Everybody who is diving off to take advantage of this trick, stop, its not true.

The opensearch protocol describes the onsite search interface, so browsers (that support it) can add that search engine as an option. So, in effect, the opensearch link on the AirBnB sist is just saying "hey, if you want you can access the AirBnB search engine straight from your browser".

It has absolutely nothing to do with how google (etc.) index and display your site in their search results.

Instead, the AirBnB homepage comes up as 'AirBnB' (mostly) because it has a huge number of trusted incoming links containing hypertext 'AirBnB'. Google treats these as kind of 'alternative title text suggestions', and if you get enough they can override the actual page text in some cases.

So the trick is (as always) to link build.

I didn't see that one coming....

In many ways, the most difficult decision would be how to merge the two different app development environments. Andriod is getting traction (in part) due to some excellent apps. These apps are developed in java that compiles to Android specific bytecode. So, from that, any merged OS would need to maintain the Android VM layer, otherwise backward compatibility would be hard.

On the other hand, chrome could be ported to Android quite easily.

So I see a Android like OS where Android Apps and Chrome web apps exist side by side (on the same desktop).

Why is it more modern? Its just a thin layer of Linux with chrom(ium) over the top. True, chrome is modern, but I am not sure the Linus layer is.

" I’d love to be able to have access to a shell and the ability to install vim + screen + git + a web server"

I can't help thinking thats beside the point and exactly what google are not designing this for.

I should imagine that switching to Amazon Route 53 would mitigate many of the attacks!

Because using Canvas requires you to manage redrawing the entire scene each frame in javascript. When using DOM based sprites, the browser takes care of the redrawing whenever you move an element (e.g. a spite).

...but perfectly acceptable in many cases.

Wow, thats an amateurish looking site!

I think a better comparison would be Amazon Simple DB in terms of its use of the cloud, but amazon RDS in terms of its relational model.

Did you use non-SSL gmail over a suspect wifi connection?

My account got hacked a month ago. Loads of spam emails were sent out from my account, and I had a login from china in the access log.

My password was strong and unique to gmail. My list of most likely attack vectors they might have exploited to get me are:

* Non-SSL gmail over compromised wifi

* Logging in when travelling on a compromised PC

* There was a story that gmail had experienced a security breach and some passwords had been 'stolen' in early 2010. Not sure of the details.

Hmmm. Interesting point. However, if that were the case, why would ELBs be restricted to single AWS regions?

Anyway, its a nice feature that it just works without me needing to set it up.