brendanib

Cool! I'll check it out.

Sorry! We hit some momentary downtime on Heroku. Back online now.

Similar, but not quite - notable is focused on design prototyping and wireframing, but our goal with Awesomebox is to follow a website throughout its lifecycle, not just during the initial design phase. I'm a big fan of ZURB though - their products are great and I've enjoyed working with the Foundation CSS framework.

That's awesome! Totally agree about remote work - our inspiration came working with people across multiple timezones, and not always being able to walk over and show them.

I'm curious - what's the name of the product you're building?

Think of Awesomebox like a versioned CDN - you can push any HTML, CSS or JS, and then invite anyone to view, comment and annotate it.

It's different from a widget in that Awesomebox gives you infinite staging environments - if you push 10 different ideas, and then invite a few people, they can easily switch between different versions without you having to manage multiple servers. In our experience, this is really important when working through new ideas or designs with clients or managers.

Does that help answer your question? Happy to explain more if not.

Thanks for the heads up! Working on a fix right now.

Thanks Des! It's come a long way since we showed you guys last month. Matt and I are very happy intercom users over here too :)

+1 to this idea.

By far the funniest part of this is the image points "non-tech workers" straight towards SOMA:

http://www.modernluxury.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/s...

Geography fail.

I believe that with nearly any ISP you're contractually prohibited from sharing your home internet connection with neighbors or anyone outside of your residence, so creating a service explicitly designed to do this is a bit of a grey area.

Great idea, getting close on execution. I've reviewed 5 sites so far though, and all of them are awful. Would be great to put together a list of 1000 great websites and let users review those, because it makes being a reviewer more fun.

Yeah, great point here. Facebook really emphasized this difference awhile back when they started allowing users to "Like" a Page, but then choose to hide it from their News Feed.

This allows me, as a Facebook user, to complete my profile and declare that I like something, even if the marketing that the associated Page is doing isn't something I want to see.

This ensures that profile information remains accurate, which is critical for ad targeting - people don't start unliking things they actually like, just to avoid annoying marketing. The interest graph remains intact even when brands make poor marketing decisions.

I'm skeptical of App.net, but I thought Dalton did a fantastic job explaining the News Feed in that piece. Really well done.

All great points.

One note: the $3 I noted in the article actually isn't CPM, it's Cost-Per-Reach, or Cost Per Unique Impression. This is an important distinction because most digital/display advertising functions on a CPM basis, where one person might see an ad multiple times. On Facebook, when a Page promotes a post, that post is only displayed to that user once.

Brands have a tendency to abuse the trust of someone opting-in, whether that's on Twitter, Facebook, Email, etc. When this happens, most people aren't aware enough to understand the cause and effect - instead of blaming the brand for being spammy, they get frustrated with Facebook.

The News Feed Algorithm and Sponsored Stories are Facebook's way of ensuring a better user experience. By pushing brands to pay a small price for distribution, Facebook gets brands to think about what they're publishing and to take advantage of the targeting options that Facebook makes available, so that their content reaches the right people.

Where did I say that anything lasted forever on the internet? Really curious where you're getting this...

We're cracking up at the office realizing this typo. Fixed. >_<

A large portion of that 700kb of js is for user-level analytics to track everything, which is fed back into everything from Ads to Page Insights to News Feed algorithms. There's a lot going on that has nothing to do with loading and displaying content.

Great question. On Facebook you pay per click or "per mille" (CPM) - it'd be great if they added "attend" as an event parameter in the Ads API so that advertisers could optimize their ads for event attendance:

https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/ads-api/optim...

In my experience Craigslist is great for capturing the older collector audience, or anyone looking to grip and flip, but Facebook Ads brought me the younger audience, who isn't otherwise dedicated enough to wake up early on a Saturday and hit 15 garage sales. There are a lot of folks that aren't willing to dedicate that kind of time to the hunt, but who still have money to spend.

Hah, yeah! My advice, unless you are a comic book expert and want to spend the time marking prices on everything, is to set a single price per item, such that on some items you'll be making more than you otherwise would, and on others you'd make a bit less.

Lots of businesses can host events, IRL and online - a brick-and-mortar shop can host a sale or a meetup, an online business can host a webinar or a conference - in fact it's tough for me to think of a business that, by nature, could not host any type of event.

Whether it makes sense for them to advertise on Facebook - that'll be up to them to test, but events are a pretty tried and true marketing technique.

I totally agree that this is a specific case. At the same time, there are a lot of smaller, brick and mortar businesses out there trying to figure out how to use Facebook Ads, and to me, hosting Events is a great way to drive people into stores (or in my case, a backyard :) )

Also, most big companies in the world actually are trying to figure out how to use Facebook Ads right now. The problem is that most haven't figured out how to create a compelling enough value proposition - I click on the ad, but what compels me as a user to take the next step? It's a big challenge for companies and agencies who are accustomed to being able to pay for captive audiences.

Yeah, I can't imagine Facebook building exactly what the commenter described, but it'd be interesting for a company like TaskRabbit to integrate their product with the Facebook Ads API, such that if you posted a task, you could pay a few bucks to run local, targeted ads to folks in order to make sure that your task reached the right people.

Yeah - I think the real challenge for startups is often that the communities and audiences for what they do, particularly early in the game, aren't often well-defined. Even when they are, they are often fragmented, and the precise interest targeting in Facebook Ads only works for Pages above a certain size threshold (unclear what exactly this is) - so if your target audience likes a few dozen smaller, scattered Pages, you can't necessarily target them directly.

For some startups/companies, though, there is a pretty clearly defined audience, or a big competitor with an audience to target. If I'm Hipmunk, I can run ads targeting Kayak, Hotwire, Expedia, to go after people who I know book travel online (and then, of that subset of people, target only people who match certain demographic/geographic parameters).

Yeah, in part, but after I invited people I knew, plus posted the event on my business's Facebook Page, there were only 40 or so people attending.

To me, it shows the power of combining native Facebook functionality like Events with Facebook Ads.

Yeah, I actually only recently started to understand the impact that area subreddits can have - great channel for certain audiences. My intuition is that most of my target audience for vinyl isn't yet on Reddit, but maybe that's changed and I just haven't realized it yet.

There are certainly a lot of forums out there too, but most of them aren't local to one area, so most of the sales are online (I did a lot of business through these forums in the past).

In retrospect, it would have been rad to run this as a fully fledged A/B test. I honestly just didn't know that the ads would have quite the impact that they did.

Absolutely - there's a huge competitive advantage being in the Bay Area, and Craigslist ads can get you pretty far. In the past, I'd used Craigslist ads for selling records and seen an okay response - maybe 20-30 people or so, but nowhere near what I saw for this.

The other advantage that I didn't fully realize until I started running the ads is how the activity within the Facebook Event serves as a reminder for people to show up - we see tons of ads for events every day that we want to go to, but very few of them ever make it onto our calendar the way that Facebook Events do with one click.

My argument isn't that Facebook Ads are the be-all end-all marketing channel - just wanted to share my experience with them. YC folks - feel free to ping me if you want help spinning up some Facebook Ads - always down to help folks out.

It's actually an idea that I've entertained before, and I think there's tons of businesses that could be built in this space (for example, I'm a huge fan of Yardsale, and this could be an interesting growth strategy for them, to build Facebook Ads directly into their platform).

Right now though, I'm having a blast working on Facebook Analytics with my team at PageLever.

Totally agree. It's a huge challenge for brands that are selling products that aren't highly differentiated too - I had the benefit of selling a niche product that's partially built on scarcity.

Commercial products are tougher, but they also have agencies whose job it is to spend time and money figuring out how to reach people. As I said, I spent about 30 minutes creating these ads.

A big part of what I like about Facebook is that it enables me, as a business owner, to compete on an equal playing field with massive Fortune 500 companies, and in this case benefit even more from Facebook Ads than they do. That's huge for anyone doing anything disruptive, whether it's a startup, a local business, or anyone competing with the status quo.

I'm curious - what other ad platform could I have turned to drive local commerce? Always interested to hear how other folks would approach the same problem.

I still have some records left over, thinking about doing another sale, would be game to test another means of customer acquisition and report back with results.