bjplink

The very first thing I thought of when this deal was announced was how similar it felt to how Google first got traction by lending their technology to a Yahoo "front-end." This feels like throwing the baby out with the bath water all over again.

I don't normally agree with Calacanis (although it's hard to argue with his success) but he's dead on about this I'm afraid.

I'm not 100% sure Google Voice is a valid example for this theory but here goes: By accepting applications that compete with the iPhone's core capabilities they stand to lose way more revenue than they do by angering some nerds by banning the application in the first place.

Here's a question. Does Apple really need tech geeks for the iPhone to be successful anymore? It's already a mainstream success, the large majority of users are probably not tech oriented at this point and the hardcore types (whom, I'm sorry, represent a small market share) are already more interested in Android phones because they like the "hacker" feel of it's operating system.

How many people out there know someone with an Android phone? I personally don't know anyone but I run in a decidedly non-techie social circle.

I think we sometimes think our outrage over "huge mistakes" have something in common with the general population's attitude when that is most definitely not the case.

Issues like removing Google Voice apps to protect their core business won't cause enough of a mass exodus to competing phones to make Apple flinch because the majority of people interested in an iPhone don't give a damn or know what Google Voice is.

Full disclosure: I'm an extremely satisfied iPhone owner.

The problem with complaining about being imposed on via Twitter is that you can't be imposed on unless you invite them to bother you. While spammers, scammers and a-holes run rampant on Twitter right now they're only effective if you open the door and let them in. If you don't, your only inconvenience is a lot of fake followers which should only be of benefit to people looking to stroke their own egos with large follower numbers anyway.

I find this particularly interesting because I run a golf handicap site with a free account that lets you enter up to 5 rounds worth of scores. At that point, the demo shuts down and you need to upgrade to lift the barrier.

The limit of 5 was chosen because it's the bare minimum needed to build a handicap (an inaccurate one, but nonetheless). But it turns out, as I've noticed over the course of the last two summers, most people upgrade when they hit the 5 round limit and then go bananas with it. I have one user who just passed the 150 round mark and most upgraded accounts have 35+ rounds.

On the other hand, a lot of the accounts that I term "dead" are demos with one or two rounds in them entered in over the course of a few weeks. They eventually never come back to even finish the demo either: because they think my site sucks or it's just not something they're motivated to keep updated.

This story is kind of more of the same and I'm sure a lot of the readers here have heard it before; if not about Joel in particular, than at least about ArsDigita and Razorfish and this era of the tech boom in general.

What IS interesting though is his mention of the Startup.com documentary. If you haven't seen it, and have any kind of passing interest in the startup space or starting your own web company, I strongly suggest you check it out. It's fantastic.

I'm not sure if this is "obviously questionable" or not but every person who sells a WordPress theme or plugin apparently doesn't have a leg to stand on if anyone challenges them by releasing their works for free.

Spammers have thousands of accounts each on Twitter. I don't see anyone suggesting that they should spend a billion dollars to buy the service.

What reason would Google possibly have for ever buying Twitter? I would hope they're gun-shy on large acquisitions after picking up the money sink they call YouTube. At least YouTube has some kind of revenue.

A purchase of Twitter just comes with a huge spam/junk problem and a reputation for technical problems.

6. Bots (spiders) are excluded from JavaScript based analytics

To me that is actually a benefit of JS based analytics programs. When I check Google Analytics in the morning I don't want to see how many search engine bots and scrapers hit my site the previous day. I want to know how many actual human beings used my site instead.

Also, and this is probably obvious since it's been pointed out that these people have a vested interest in log parsers, this article would better be titled as "10 Reasons Why Web Log Analyzers Should Be Used WITH JavaScript Based Analytics." I would argue most people serious about tracking traffic use both anyway but those that don't should see the benefits.

This site isn't nearly spammy enough for the savages over at Digital Point but Flippa might be worth a try.

Also, if you're serious about selling, put a very visible graphic on every page with a link to a sales pitch PDF. The basic stuff everyone here has asked for should be included: traffic, revenue and background technology information.

With no revenue you're going to find yourself instantly offended by low-ball offers but you might find a diamond in the rough if you're patient.

I've only had my iPhone since the 3GS launched (so barely two full weeks) but I've already stopped taking my laptop with me when I work out of town.

I used to lug my laptop around as more of a precautionary measure and not out of necessity. But with decent SSH, FTP and other "sys admin" apps available for the iPhone my laptop is now collecting dust in a closet.

This is actually a really clever way to advertise his real site: http://themeshaper.com

I'm sure a lot of people will follow the funnel from this site to his store. And if they don't he's only out a $10/year domain registration fee and some time.

Here's a few of the more common places to buy and sell domain names:

http://www.dnforum.com http://flippa.com/buy-websites?filterby=domains http://www.sedo.com http://forums.digitalpoint.com/forumdisplay.php?f=59

That should be enough to get you started at least.

Third vote for Fusion. I'm on 4 gigs of RAM as well and I run XP alongside my other programs all day without problems.

I've been a freelance web developer, off and on, since I graduated from college in 2003. My latest "freelance stint" has just recently passed the one year mark. In between I've had full-time jobs for people who eventually became steady freelance clients. So that's my background.

Until recently, I had seen a huge drop off in requests for proposals and the few I did get were dead ends. In hindsight, this started happening during the early winter of last year. But in the last few months I've been picking up more odd jobs so on that front, at least in the short-term, things seems to be getting better.

I haven't had to go out and actively seek new clients in quite awhile because I've put together a steady stable of recurring clients. Most of my client base is in the professional sports field and even in down economic times, teams still need to keep their websites up and running. So that's my "secret" to freelance success in a bad economy: have good clients in stable industries.

Aside from freelance web dev work, I've also put together a decent network of sites earning money through advertising. At this time last year those sites were on pace to make a respectable amount of money each year. It wasn't a living wage but some months it came awfully damn close. Since the economy went to the dump I've seen a huge drop off in revenue from these sites. Some earn 50% less now than they did at this time last year. This income was, for lack of a better term, unnecessary for me to pay my bills and live so while it's a bummer I can live without it.

This was a bit rambling but that's my experience so far with the poor economy as a freelance web developer.

You're right. I believe the premise of the $7 ebook is that $7 is the "breaking point" price that people can buy something they're unsure about and not be upset that they've wasted too much money.

I originally wrote an incredibly snarky reply (it even had a link to a simple Google search) but I'm reconsidering now...

In any collegiate environment you should be able to find plenty of art students looking for opportunities to build a portfolio. Find them. Use them. Pay them if they insist but I guarantee you can get away with offering very little.

Whatever it is you do, don't offer them stake or equity. Just get what you need done and move on.

Right now freelance graphic design is as cutthroat and savage as ever. People will do anything for insanely cheap prices. If you can scrape together a little money I think you'd be surprised to find out how far it can go if you look in the right places. Try freelance message boards and even somewhat seedier places like Digital Point (http://forums.digitalpoint.com/forumdisplay.php?f=104).

I have some experience building enterprise software and I'd have to say the problem was that it is mind numbingly boring to do. A lot of it sucks, so to speak, because people can't stay motivated to give a damn.

It's pretty soul crushing to spend all of your working time building systems for inventory management, or AP/AR, or whatever mundane (but incredibly important) business function you're working on. This is why people make startups I suppose.

I agree that, if you have the mental toughness for it, enterprise software is a GREAT way to make money. During my days of having a real job, we were selling our software for $250,000 an install.

I think all of Stunt Software's products come with 20 day trials. My experience is with version 2 of On The Job but the newest edition looks even better so I'm probably going to upgrade shortly.

As a Mac user, I'm a huge fan of On The Job (http://stuntsoftware.com/OnTheJob). You enter in a task and the charge per hour, hit play and go to work. You hit stop when you're done and it builds the invoice for you automatically.

Ha, I knew that one would provoke a response. Click fraud is a very real problem with AdSense that I wish drew more attention.

I'm going to stop now because this is diverging into a pissing match of sorts, but I've been in the business of making money with online advertising myself long enough to feel qualified to comment and pay my bills.

I can think of two things, right off the top of my head, that FeedBurner could do better:

#1. Accurately measure subscriptions. That seems obvious but FeedBurner is actually terrible at one of their core features. It's not uncommon for your subscriber count to bottom out to zero from one day to the next as their system fails to work.

#2. Find a way to find and eliminate the cheaters. FeedBurner's subscribe-via-email feature is a great way for people to scam the system and raise their subscriber counts. All you have to do is make a bunch of dummy accounts, which is trivial for anyone with any kind of decent hosting package, and then use those accounts to subscribe to your feed.

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Subscriber counts are an important metric for both ego and site valuation. The fact that FeedBurner has such a struggle with accurate counts hurts their credibility too much.

For every person making $XXX a day with AdSense there are a thousand making $XXX a year. Or things are humming along smoothly until you wake up one morning and you've been smart priced back to the stone age and aren't making anything per click anymore. The only guaranteed winner with AdSense is Google themselves. The reason AdSense is so successful is because Google takes an unspecified cut of every click and it's an industry built on the back of ringtone scams and click fraud.

Being beholden to a market that consists of a bunch of AdWords account managing hooligans that gnash and claw all day to drive bid prices down and are being governed by Google isn't really the kind of market you want to be counting on long term. Which just goes back to my point that while things might be good one day, by relying on an outside party for revenue, you might wake up tomorrow and be screwed because of decisions made by people totally unrelated to you or your product.

The problem with ad revenue as a business model is that you're beholden to something you can't control directly that is controlled by a third party. With products/subscriptions it's an A to B relationship without the extra C group of advertisers who actually pay the bills for you.

I disagree that people think it isn't really money though. I believe that people think it isn't really reliable.

I spent several years working for a very small commercial printer and was in charge of the billing/inventory system there. Eventually, since I was tracking the raw materials, I was put in charge of ordering paper.

We only three mid-sized printing presses and I was dropping just under six figures every month on paper alone. Of course, we weren't printing on the kind of paper you get with the NYT. This was higher quality stuff but you can get an idea of the costs involved.

I have some experience in the printing industry and this doesn't come as much of a surprise to me. Printing is a hugely difficult business to turn a profit with. The harsh reality is that the cost of doing business is so high that profits are usually depressing by comparison.

The URL Control part is the key. A lot of spammers and scammers are already doing this themselves using TinyURL as a front for affilaite re-directs.

It might be morally questionable though for Twitter to hijack the Amazon links of the everyman who is just posting something with no intention of making a profit from it.

You generally can't throw a rock in a crowded room of programming nerds and not hit someone who has built their own CMS these days. I've basically built my freelance career out of building and selling a set of CMS software and I'm sure others here could say the same.

For a simple term like Content Management System, it seems like everyone has a different interpretation of what that means. I think that alone answers you question about whether or not this is a solved problem. There's always going to be some target market with a need that can't be solved with current CMS software.

I agree. I would imagine this is an idea that is nearly impossible to turn a dime with.

What are your options really? Either charge a monthly fee for a service that your users can find for free elsewhere (either right now, or eventually) or you can slide in ads between the feeds you serve that no one is going to bother to click on anyway.

The big appeal of FeedBurner for most people is their subscriber count monitoring and, unfortunately for them, it's something they don't do a very good job of tracking to begin with.

The other big unspoken aspect of FeedBurner is that those very counts are so easy to manipulate that trusting anyone's numbers is too big of a leap of faith anyway. The whole system is about bunk now.

I haven't seen anything that says all 21 million people had problems. All I see is another sensationalistic headline from TechCrunch.

There is a plug at the end because that's how blogs make money; by selling links and paid mentions.