benackles

This is pretty basic, but often ignored advice for information architecture.

The article linked to [1] was also pretty interesting. The line that caught my eye was "The URL will continue to be part of the Web user interface for several more years...". Keep in mind that was published in 1999, therefore Nielsen seems to be implying that he believed the URL will eventually become less relevant as a part of the UI. I don't see this happening anytime soon on the "web", but it's certainly true on "mobile".

Modern Web Application frameworks such as WordPress, Ruby on Rails and many more are forcing good practices on the web moving forward. Most startups today are following all the practices detailed in this article as a result of the frameworks imposed on them.

[1] http://www.nngroup.com/articles/url-as-ui/

After spending a few minutes using the product, I have to agree. It's a very minimal product, but it has extremely poor usability considering it's lack of options. I was only commenting on the expectation for more than a minimal product from Google.

Referring to something as minimal doesn't seem like a knock on the product. It's not just startups that follow lean methodologies. Google can create a minimal viable product too. In fact, this is exactly what they should do. Feature bloated products are terrible ways to launch.

Free works, but for whom? Certainly a lot of companies are doing well by giving away everything, but how long will the acquihire exit strategy remain open? Furthermore, the user is getting absolutely screwed. There have been a lot of notable services that have popped up over the last few years and then some big company came in to pick up the talent and dumped the product and subsequently its users.

I've been fortunate to only get screwed twice, first with Gowalla and now with Google Reader. Although I used Google Reader for longer and much more frequently than Gowalla, in a way I feel less screwed (if at all) by Google. Google Reader is a very portable product by its natural connection to RSS. Google has also taken a few important steps towards making data portable for it's millions of users.

It took less than a minute to transfer to another service. I'm testing out Feedly for now, but I would rather host my own RSS reader and take control myself. If a consumer product provides adequate data portability the idea of hosting my content for me is something I feel perfectly comfortable doing.

My point is its less concerning that everything is free, but more how anti-competitive these services are with my data. If I can at any moment retain control and back up everything or move it over to a competing service, I'm okay with investing time in adopting a free service.

However, moving your data between services as they inevitably shutdown does seem like a short term fix. I think Marco's idea for a mirror of the reader API is a great long term solution[1]. For the average user, people would probably opt for a popular host. For people who want to host it themselves (probably a minority), they could do so with ease.

[1] http://www.marco.org/2013/03/14/baby-steps-replacing-google-...

You rarely see an animated gif used for a practical purpose. It's usually followed by hysterical laughter. At least that's usually the intent.

Why does the title of this post mention a funding round and link to the actual product? It reads like a TC-style blog post. It's very misleading and a lost opportunity.

The product is interesting and probably a good idea in light of Google's shutdown of Reader. Google Alerts almost certainly won't be around indefinitely and Mention.net can jump in to scoop up a user base once Alerts is shuttered.

You run into the same problem you had with Posterous. Having your own domain does nothing to prevent Tumblr from running out of cash and shutting down your blog. Luckily Twitter/Posterous are doing the right thing by providing a way to retain control of your data. Imagine if they didn't provide those tools, you're at the mercy of the platform.

I'm not on Posterous, but I am on Tumblr and I do worry the company won't always be around once the cash runs dry or they get acquihired.

I like the WordPress strategy of strong data portability features within a hosted environment and an open source, self-hosted option. This way even if WordPress.com (Automattic) gets acquired, WordPress.org will always be an option without having to get comfortable with an entirely new platform. Of coarse, if you're a developer you could always just use an open source static site generator like Jekyll or Middleman.

I bought it too. It's definitely worth $12. Code School is also planning a course on Ember.js to be released in the coming months. It will be a paid (subscription) course as well.

I did notice that Ember.js ran quite slow in my local environment. I'm curious if there's something I could do to speed it up in development. Having played around with Discourse, I'm certain speed isn't a problem in production.

Hey John,

First of all, gorgeous mockups! I love where you're headed with the design and user experience. The cluttered WordPress dashboard and clunky post editor are my least favorite aspects of WordPress. I also really like how you're incorporating Markdown syntax.

There are a few points where I disagree.

Forking WordPress would mean keeping loads of legacy code. It would also mean you'd be binding a future platform for publishing to technologies WordPress adopted nearly a decade ago. Why use PHP? Perhaps Python, Ruby or server-side JavaScript (Node.js) are better choices. Why use MySQL? MongoDB or PostgreSQL may be a better fit.

Wouldn't merging 8+ configurable plugins into core be contradictory to avoiding bloat? Shouldn't you start with a clean slate? The plugin system is a great way to customize your environment to fit your individual needs. If you add defaults, you make it less personalized. You also add more bloat by adding functionality not everyone wants.

His argument about "No Corporate Arm of The Law" seems a little flawed. He compares WordPress to Mozilla and argues that Ghost will be more like Mozilla. Mozilla Corporation is a for-profit arm of Mozilla Foundation. They are nearly identical to the relationship between WordPress Foundation and Automattic inc. Each companies corporate arm generates revenue and reinvests those dollars and development resources back into their open source projects. This is the reason WordPress and FireFox have been such successful open source projects. They have the right balance of leadership, resources and community involvement.

It seems as though Kickstarter should be using this. They currently charge up to 10% for successfully funded projects. Their rationale is they use Amazon Payments to process transactions. Amazon charges 3-5% on top of Kickstarter's cut of 5%. If Stripe charges 2.9% + $.30 that still leaves a couple points on the table for either Kickstarter profits or to lower the fee for creators. http://www.kickstarter.com/help/faq/kickstarter%20basics#Wha...

I agree. 30 minutes is too long to charge for any practical purpose. They're going to have to improve the wait time if they're going to break out of the uber EV geek community. The Better Place battery switching model, while it may not be feasible for current models it has to be the goal for future models.

It also seems as thought there should be more partnerships involved in reaching the type of scale there going to to want to achieve. It seems like there would be a perfect opportunity to team up with Better Place to scale there infrastructure. Tesla should focus on building the best cars possible while letting Better Place handle the charging and/or battery switching infrastructure. I love the idea of Solar City getting involved as well. Those three companies are on my list of the few companies to watch in clean tech.

We often hear that "ideas are worthless, execution is everything", so it comes as no surprise that someone who executes well, should reap the rewards. I've heard many times about how terrible the Samwer brothers are for "ripping off" others innovations, but the truth is they have proven that they can out execute the original innovators.

In the case of Groupon, there was very little innovation, so riding the wave over an incumbent seemed on obvious. However many have tried, but few have executed as well as Samwer and in the end Samwer proved the business was too simple to emulate.

I don't think in the case of Stripe and Square that emulation will be a viable strategy. Payments by their very nature suggest an extremely high level of trust. Short term emulation would seem to breach that trust. I wouldn't invest the time nor money in a platform which is inherently built to sellout.

Pinterest on the other hand...well...good luck!

On the one hand, it frightens me to think that an ideology-driven company like News Corp thinks it can generate 10 percent of it's future revenue from education. On the other hand, it seems highly unlikely they'll succeed in this objective. The future of education will come form the bottom up, where innovators create new technologies to solve problems, not prop up their struggling print divisions.

The reality is education will be solved by entrepreneurs and forward-thinking educators. If you attack the problem with a pure profit motive, you aren't solving the core problems. Education is a sector rife with inefficiencies and ineffectiveness, but it's not cash cow, at least it won't be in the very near future. Budgets are getting slash and the cost of traditional education is becoming misaligned with value.

There's plenty of opportunities in education, but it's hard to believe an aging $55 billion company is going generate 10 percent of their revenues from a sector in budgetary decline.

While I backed this project and think its sorely needed to allow software developers access to the console platforms, I think the design of the controller was rather disappointing. I figured if they were going to create a new hardware platform it would have a more revolutionary form factor.

The controller hasn't changed since the mid-1980s. Almost all the game console makers make the same damned controllers with exception to the Wii there's been almost no innovation.

It's about time to rethink the standard controller design. I'm not talking about game-specific controllers, like the gun or joystick. I think there needs to be something more attached to actual human body movements.

I know this project was about an open game console, but I think this creates the opportunity for innovation in hardware accessories (i.e. the controller). I think we could do a lot better than the same old formula:

Up+Down+Left+Right A+B+X+Y R1+R2+L1+L2 Select+Start (ALL BUTTONS)

Not only was his business built on top of the Twitter API, but his "key feature" was merely semantics. I'm not even convinced he should get the credit for originality, Stowe Boyd published an article on the topic in July of 2009 [1].

Companies that rely wholly on a third-party API aren't sustainable businesses, they're hobbies and oddly they have become overfunded hobbies. Twitter's starting to put a lot of hobby-companies out of business.

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20091015145325/http://www.microsy...

To be fair, they have been charging from day one, through other offerings. Although Trello is a free product, it's maintained by a VERY profitable bootstrapped company. They have a brand to protect. Killing a product used by half a million people seems like a terrible idea. It seems like they should integrate their paid products into Trello and cross-promote with paid services.

I'm usually right there with you on the "free vs paid" bandwagon. In this case, there does seem to be a clear disincentive to kill a product that would probably destroy the reputation of a profitable brand. I do think it's a dumb idea to count out ever charging for a product. If people are willing to pay, that should always be an option. Also, as a free service for business users they should definitely find ways to make users data completely portable. I'm much more comfortable using a free service if there's a data portability option.

UPDATE: There is already a data portability option.

"Portability

Your data is yours. If you ever want to stop using Trello, you should be able to download your data. All Fog Creek products feature data portability where applicable. We strongly believe in it. To export your data, simply open a card or click the board title, then Profile. click the 'Share, Print, and Export' button, and you'll find export options. Currently, we allow export to JSON which is a format that lends itself well to technical usages and cannot be loaded into programs like Microsoft Excel. It is, however, complete, and so does suffice as a backup."

Since when did Salesforce buy a high-value, two-letter '.com' domain and turn it into a bloated to-do list application? Talk about a big, dumb company move... Aren't to-do list applications the type of thing solo hackers or small teams build as side projects?

I'm a little surprised they didn't put Rose on the YouTube team. He would've been a great figure head for the video platform. It would have played to his strengths as a creator and promoter of pro-am content.

That being said, perhaps Google Ventures is a great place too. Kevin has shown a strong ability to act as a connector between budding entrepreneurs and capital. This might be a brilliant move for deal flow.

It was a metaphor.

Elon Musk is the next Steve Jobs. What Jobs did for computing, Musk is doing for Space exploration. In this video he displays many of the same signs of a "reality distortion field". He describes quite candidly what the general public thinks is crazy and unachievable (especially in 2002). In some ways I think his way of thinking is much more contrarian than Jobs. This year seems to be a tipping point for how we (the average person) see the future of space.

From all who care to dream, Thank you Elon Musk!

I should clarify, I'm speaking as it relates to raising capital; not on the existence of 24/7 support at a premium price point. It still seems to be a common theme where companies raise venture capital for the sake of "going into enterprise". There is a big difference between using cash flows to add 24/7 support and raising VC money. The downside of bringing in outside money seems to outweigh the quick cash infusion.

My suspicion is the founders are taking money off the table in a similar manner as 37signals did when they took money from Bezos Expeditions [Jeff Bezos]. Considering the fact that they're bootstrapped, profitable and growing like a weed it seems reasonable to sell a portion of the company to the greatest advisor [Marc Andreessen].

That still doesn't answer why you need to raise VC money. How does VC money add value to a company which already has an "enterprise" solution and is a known brand to almost all Fortune 500 companies? GitHub is already making a lot of money via cash flow and VC money will only make them beholden to outside interests. Stack Overflow tried to spin why they were raising money after spending years railing against VC-backed ventures. This seems to be a similar scenario.

[1] https://enterprise.github.com

What does "[going] into enterprise" mean? Almost every fortune 500 company is using GitHub in some capacity. Isn't "[going] into enterprise" simply marketing jargon when you're talking about SaaS products like GitHub.

Digg is one notable example of a founder taking money of the table and the investment falling apart. Kevin Rose took quite a lot of money off the table and it could be argued that's when the Digg lost it's visionary leader. Kevin seemed to shift his focus away from building a successful company towards investing and advising other companies. I think it's hard to argue he did the wrong thing on a personal level, but for the company it was devastating. I think allowing a founder to take SOME (enough to not worry about personal finances) money off the table is reasonable for an entrepreneur that's reached some level of success. But it's an entirely different story to allow a venture-backed founder to take a sizable amount of cash off the table, enough to greatly reduce any incentive to build a company worthy of a successful exit or an IPO.

This is a great solution to unobtrusively learn vocabulary while reading the things we're interested in. As others pointed it's weakness is clearly in how it handles sentence structure, but it seems reasonable to accept that it's just going to do one thing really well.

There's only one problem I see with learning vocabulary this way, you need a way to store what you've learned. I thought of one solution, you could drag and drop words into a box linked to your Quizlet (or a similar service) account.

Great Extension. Thanks!

I never thought that was an "American obsession". If it is, you might want to borrow from those Americans. Customer Support is not only a way to help users better use your product, it's also a chance to know your customer better. It's an opportunity to see through the eyes of a layman. If it's as simple as telling someone what button to push, use it as a chance to humanize your product. If it's really that simple, you both look like a genius (ok...not really) and really need to build a better FAQ.

WordPress was an abandoned open source project called B2, before it was forked and became the juggernaut it is today.

I'm not convinced Yahoo buying Facebook for $1 billion would have been a good deal for Yahoo. Yahoo never would have been able to make Facebook nearly as successful as it is today. I have my doubts Facebook would be worth even a $1 billion today. Yahoo has an awful track record of making the worst out of their acquisitions and I don't see how this would have been any different.

Look up Orman Clark from PremiumPixels.com. He's sold well over a million dollars on ThemeForest. Unfortunately, the marketplace is now filled with a lot of get rich quick schemers. I know they're (Envato) trying to work on cleaning up the community, but it's going to be a challenge as the market grows. If you want to be successful on ThemeForest in the long-term, I suggest building your own brand to co-exist with the marketplace. Orman serves as a good example of creating a brand differentiated from others. His sense of design is incredible and his success is well deserved.