callmevlad

Even so, the developers could have taken the high road and put up a generic "This site is currently offline. Please check back soon." message.

When people don't pay their phone bill, the phone company politely tells callers that "the phone number is no longer in service." They don't have a recording saying "Bill is a loser who can't pay his bills, so we TP-ed his house and called his kids ugly ... oh and you should probably be friends with Jack instead, he's better looking!"

You know you have a problem with how you treat your customers when the phone companies do a better job than you.

This seems very unprofessional and amateurish - on the part of the web developer. Yes, maybe the client didn't pay, but resorting to this type of public lynching will a) kill any remaining chance of compensation/reconciliation and b) probably damage the reputation of the web developers.

I've had my fair share of clients who didn't pay for various reasons. Sometimes, small claims court was in order. Sometimes, having patience and giving a struggling client time (literally almost 5 years) led to a payment in full (plus interest!) completely out of the blue. The guy's business picked up, and now he's still a super happy client.

What goes around comes around.

It's such a blatant copy of Ive that it makes me think they did it very purposefully just to see if people would notice.

According to https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Fitbit uses a 3D accelerometer, so it seems to be more complex than just a pedometer. I've found it to be quite accurate for daytime activity, especially tracking when I'm being really active. But I'm just now starting to use it to measure sleep (and to compare the results to the WakeMate while I'm at it), so can't speak much to its effectiveness yet.

I stopped using mine the day I got it because it emitted a annoying loud whiny noise the second I plugged it in. I immediately thought "cheap Chinese manufacturing" and started using my white iPhone charger instead. Glad I did.

What makes this more serious is that the WakeMate seems to be really power hungry and needs almost constant charging - I've noticed that it usually can't go 2 straight nights without a recharge. Since that's the case, I imagine most people just plug it into the defective charger each morning, so it's plugged in for about 16 hours per day. But maybe my battery is also defective ...

Not sure how these two are different technically (both probably have similar accelerometers), but I also have a FitBit that I wear all day long - yet I only need to charge that guy maybe once a week.

Hoping the WakeMate guys get through this, though ...

Thanks for the response and insight - I definitely understand that it's hard to keep track of sporadic issues especially when usage is exploding like yours did in the last few days.

Going from 5k to 5M is really impressive - congrats on your sudden impressive growth!

However, the "there was no downtime" seems a bit disingenuous given my own experience signing up for the service yesterday. I received many "service unavailable" messages during signup, after clicking on the email verification link, and finally after signing up. Searching Twitter at the time for "Pinboard" showed that many other users were getting the same message (e.g. http://twitter.com/davekincaid/status/15520511979167744) ... there were many others, but unfortunately Twitter's 'older tweets' search doesn't seem to be working now.

I actually didn't care that the service was down for me even though I had just paid to sign up for it; I figured you guys were getting absolutely hammered by the unexpected news around Delicious. However, seeing your response here was surprising - either you didn't have monitoring tools set up to show you that indeed there was downtime or we have a drastically different definition of 'downtime'.

From now on, this sentence will appear in all the job descriptions I write:

> We'd like someone who isn't all "durrrr" when they look at Photoshop.

I'm wondering how much can be attributed to how Quantcast measures traffic. Compete.com and Alexa, for example, both show a decline, but it's nowhere close to being as dramatic as the Quantcast one.

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/variety.com/ http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/variety.com

A great example comes from 37signals - http://answers.37signals.com/basecamp/52-how-can-i-move-or-c... - look for Sam Stephenson's reply (from Sept 8th) in which he explains all the edge cases below the surface.

How about BlindType? http://www.mobilecrunch.com/2010/07/21/video-blind-type-allo...

The low number of trademarks on their legal page, the up to date privacy policy, and the complete transparency about how the data is stored has me completely convinced that this is a legitimate operation. </sarcasm>

I agree. The majority of their concerns can be addressed by parsing out markup on the way into the DB and storing the markup-free version in a separate location. This is a lot of acrobatics for marginal return.