babebridou

Give it time, and people will get out in the streets again (terrorist attacks), people will eat meat again (mad cow disease), people will buy cucumber again (killing cucumber), strangers will shake hands again (H1N1 influenza), hell, people will even go visit Chernobyl as tourists.

It's not a "real" issue, it's more of a temporary difficulty. AirBnB's business exists since the dawn of time. A setback, if you prefer.

I meant for the company. It's not needed to involve the company's money in this case.

As a side note, how big are those appartments in San Francisco? Here in Paris for that kind of money each month you get 60 square meters and no single person can afford those. Most live in a third or a half of this surface.

Java APIs are not designed to "just work" but rather to "eventually work with anything".

The thing is, there's no reason why it should cost 10k bucks in the first place. Okay, well, unless there are travel costs included.

Fact is, before anything else, this is a personal matter, so do it as a person - ideally on your spare time (if you ever can make some) with your personal funds if you can - everyone will accept a founder doing this, it will not engage any responsibility/liability whatsoever, it will not establish any precedent, and it will change the reception radically, for both the victim, the company and the public.

This is a person offering another person to meet, talk aaaaaand 3 years from now we have "Beds & Breaks" hitting the theatres, a movie loosely based on real facts, starring...

I believe the answer to the question "what can AirBnb do?" is really only somewhere deep within the subconsciousness of the victim, and can't be found in a book, nor on an internet forum. Just move your butt and go ask her in person what she needs. Chances are, the first things the victim needs is in the likes of a roof and some emotional council - a cup of coffee, a discussion, a phone number and maybe a few hundred bucks for immediate expenses can help pave the way for the next steps, which are damage assessment and recovery.

It's cheap, considerate and probably much more effective than a simple "sorry" press release. And it has nothing, nothing to do with legal responsibility/liability at this point. When someone is distressed enough to ask specifically for my help, it's the kind of things I'd eagerly do, whether it's my fault or not.

Let's be blunt: when there's a fire, the first thing that's required is to contain it. They failed at containing their public presence to a specific website/social network and now there are little flame wars sprouting everywhere and no way to adress every opinion.

Unfortunately, I believe the best option at this point for AirBnB is to do nothing about it for this specific case, and brace for the next impact by preparing the field in advance (centralize comments in order to assimilate and answer public questions).

This story should not be bigger than what's happened/happening to the victim - and that's huge enough already. Make her feel better first, then see what you can do about your "image". Tell your side of the story in one place and be receptive for critics. Something good can come out of this mess, but they won't find it if they think hiring more people to monitor/participate in more forums on the internet is a solution.

This situation is in fact a very understandable vendetta of the unfortunate victim towards the rest of the world - and she is right - everyone should pay for what she suffered. The actual word is compassion, and there's never enough of it in the whole world for any single unfortunate person.

With that said, no company with AirBnB's business model can publicly say they will assist victims whatever the cost. It's just impossible. It would be a blatant lie. They must at least maintain some sort of windshield against insurance frauds, and doing that requires tons of hard PR and legal decisions to be made, and the assistance of lawyers. And everyone hates lawyers. Companies are sometimes inherently good, sometimes not, but they should never be inherently so stupid as to sign their own commercial/financial/legal doom. You can get up from bad PR, but you can't get up from bankrupcy.

Now after this argument in favor of an actual public silence, let's see what we have: 1) a victim 2) there is no 2. There is a victim and that's all.

Just fix the victim. No need to go through internet flamewars or PR messes, no need to even listen to that. Airbnb should just send a team of 24/7 dedicated people with quasi carte blanche (within what the company can afford, of course) to see through that victim gets better, if that objective can even be met. If the "get better" project goes so wrong as to lead to law suits or whatnot, then let justice decide, because in the end, yes, someone has to pay for what happened, and the legal system is here to decide who should pay.

Now about PR: switch the debate from a "what did AirBnB do in that situation" witch-hunt to "This is what we are doing, this is how it's going from our point of view, now what do you (Mr/Mrs Customer) think we could improve on?". Open a public discussion on your social network and dedicate someone to analyze public input. And use it the next time something like this happens (because unfortunately, it will happen again). Centralize this debate somewhere where you can handle all this information, and by "handle" I don't mean "censor" but of course "assimilate".

...and just ignore those stupid emergent flame wars between big internet guns who are mostly in for pride (white knights & trolls) and money (journalists, consultants, lobbyists & investors). Let them deal with the crap they fling around themselves, and keep focusing on the "get better" project: the victim asked specifically for your help, and that's what really matters here.

Related link: an analysis of an excellent online PR crisis management by Monoprix (in French only, sorry) http://guybirenbaum.blogitexpress.com/91728/html The "victim" (an employee who got fired for taking home unsold & trashed goods) explained that he "tried hard to make a fuss and a buzz" of his situation because he felt that nothing short of prosecution and trial could make him feel better. This is a case of a failing "get better" project with exemplary PR - and to be honest, it's only when the project fails that PR become important. What did Monoprix do? They centralized the debate on their Facebook page, switched the focus from "Monoprix is bad" to a laconic "here's what we are doing, tell us what we can improve on" and they have dedicated Community Managers assimilating and discussing the comments instead of censoring them.

Mine patents. Build grunts. Give all grunts the same unoccupied office suite in Texas. Sell patent to grunts with revenue sharing clause. Select a grunt, scroll to target, right-click.

Unity3d has its own javascript-like language and introduced the keyword #pragma-strict - it enforces static typing within a script. I imagine an IDE could make good use of such toggle, for the best of both worlds.

http://unity3d.com/support/documentation/ScriptReference/ind...

I wish there was be something, actually, that would match what you can do with the Eclipse/Java combo for other languages.

Eclipse turns java into a ctrl-space fest. People yell at java for being verbose and statically typed, but all this verbosity is what allows an IDE such as Eclipse to exist. Just press ctrl+space and the verbosity turns into clarity and speed for both the programmer and the IDE.

I have more than a million lines of codes behind me since I learned how to program, 4 years ago. That's 250 thousand lines of working code per year, and I didn't even code more than half-time in java, and I can't type faster than 40wpm. I'm not advocating quantity vs quality, just saying that quantity becomes a completely irrelevant measure when you use Eclipse & Java, and that's very refreshing; you can keep coding long, dumb, and not performance-critical code while you think about another more important/complex section of your project, participate to a meeting, discuss stuff on the phone - you just set sail and let Eclipse do the hard rowing for you.

As for refactoring - delete a class named MyClass with a doStuff() method in a project, create a new interface MyClass with a doStuff() method in another project and another package, add this project as a dependency to the first project, select the first project, press ctrl+shift+O, et voila, every file was fixed, and it simply works within a few seconds even if there are a thousand sources referencing that MyClass. I'm not sure if there's any language/IDE that allows that sort of fast & furious refactor, but do tell!

What are other great IDE/language combos?

Try France & Germany: €629 all included, that's $910 USD.

I'm in no way an expert, but from what I could gather, here's a link to the (probable?) patent: http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=tpqzAAAAEBAJ