612 karma · joined May 12, 2008
Wait, what? I had to stop reading here. Someone else please finish and let me know if this was satire or not. If the answer is "not," and this guy honestly thinks "RateMyTeacher.com" is a positive indicator of the future health of journalism in America... well, I'll be glad I didn't waste my time with the rest of this article.
The post is basically a bunch of quotes about Apple a netbooks. Some saying they should have one because an Apple netbook would be cool (it probably would be), some saying not having a netbook is hurting Apple (they seem to be doing just fine), some making shoddy predictions about slumping sales, and some saying Apple is a missing an opportunity (maybe they are).
And Gruber's conclusion appears to be that had Apple had a netbook they'd be losing money. How does one reach that conclusion? Presumably, he means that netbook sales would cannibalize high end laptop sales. But that's doubtful. Most people who buy a netbook either have a high end laptop as well (like me -- I have a Macbook, a Sony VAIO, and an Asus EeePC) or were never going to buy a high end laptop in the first place.
So... you can debate the merits or necessity of Apple adding a netbook all you want, but claiming that adding a netbook would have caused Apple to _lose_ money is just silly.
That said, Gruber appears to be a Yankees fan, so he can't be all bad...
Seems I jumped the gun a bit. ;)
And now indeed Posterous has surged past FriendFeed. I stand corrected. ;)
http://bit.ly/17pcJw (Compete)
http://bit.ly/3lGxXl (Alexa)
http://bit.ly/Gmk08 (Quantcast)
All show FriendFeed growing and only Quantcast shows Posterous as larger (and a lot larger -- and for months now). Quantcast actually has FriendFeed traffic way up since the Facebook acquisition.
Not all developers on [insert platform here] are getting rich. But some are. Not everyone who starts any type of business will strike it rich. But some will. Why is this news?
Facebook messaging is like email... and if you get a lot of messages, subjects can be helpful.
The comparison to Twitter doesn't really make sense. It is Facebook status that is like Twitter (and has no subject requirement). Facebook's inbox is not like Twitter.
Why are you assuming the "algorithm" just includes the finance bits? It also includes the people involved (mentors, investors, community). Why wouldn't that be replicable in other cities outside the Valley? As long as they have both the financial capital and the social capital I don't see why it couldn't be successfully duplicated.
TechStars seems to be doing well in Boulder and Boston. Seedcamp seems to be doing well in London. Launchbox seems to be doing pretty well in DC. DreamIt seems to be working well for Philly. Someone could do it in Chicago (or any other moderately sized city with some semblance of a tech community already, some willing investors (or the ability to attract investors from other parts of the world), and a few nearby universities) with the right network.
From a semi-outsider perspective, the entrepreneurial community in Boston seems fairly healthy even without YC.
Nothing in the way the "client" conducted himself (or themselves) indicated that they should have gotten anything better than what they received.
This whole post seems like a poorly conceived (and failed) stab at humor. Meh.
But not every Twitter client and site uses Bit.ly (HootSuite uses ow.ly, for example, and Digg uses, well, digg.com). And, you know, not every short URL is made for Twitter.
(Note: this isn't supposed to be a response to the original post, which I only skimmed.)
Of course you don't have to be social media famous ... but if you want to be, then go for it. I don't see any reason to listen to someone telling you not to pursue your goal just because it's not an imperative for everyone who uses that medium.
That site has been around for awhile, and I think the biggest problem is sick people don't generally feel like going online and contributing open data projects. The geekiest among us might, but most people just want to lie on the couch and watch movies and sip ginger ale when their sick -- not get online and log their symptoms and recovery time.
What might work is getting mother's to record data about their sick children or doctors to record aggregate data about their patients. Neither of those groups will want to (or in the case of doctors are legally able to) share specific information about the people who are sick, but the data about what's going around your town could be valuable to you as a parent or as a patient (and to other doctors and the CDC).
I know I'd personally rather spend more and not get cancer (as long as the tests aren't so invasive and unpleasant that they drastically lower the quality of my life), for example, than wait and treat the cancer later simply because that's the cheaper route.
That is, you don't want to accidentally create a class system where top users are given enviable privileges that new users feel like they can't attain. When that happens, you end up exacerbating the 99/9/1 problem even more by making it very hard for most new users to get into your community.
As an example, I've been a moderator at a number of forums over the past 15 years or so, and at a few we've rewarded people with special privileges based on the number of posts -- such as images in their signature, special badges under their avatar, additional private message space. Some of those rewards are hidden (like PM space), but some are very visual (like special badges) and had the effect of creating a class system in the community. People will special badges were seen by new users as special and their contributions were assumed to be more important -- even though that wasn't the case. Eventually, the divide was so great and it was so hard for new users to catch up that we ended up with just a small number of active users -- those who had been with us a long time and already had a high post count.
(I'm not talking about any forum community in particular, but have seen this happen on more than a couple.)
Maybe I'm unique, but I would never apply for a job if I didn't know where I was applying. I want to know a lot about the company before I even consider taking the time to apply for the job. Why waste my time only to find out my supposed dream job is actually located somewhere I'd never want to move or with a company that I'd never want to work for?
The blog post about this service talks a lot about how important finding the right "fit" between employee and employer is ... but if the applicants never even know what or where or who they're applying to, doesn't that just add an extra step in trying to determine if there is a fit?
I understand the idea of making it easier to tweet out job links and spread job listing virally. Not a bad idea. But not sure I understand how this many any more sense than just using bit.ly to link to a traditional, full job listing somewhere else.
Where there exists a problem is when blogs with a clear bias try to report news, and pollute that reportage with their opinions while claiming to their readers to be covering things objectively.
1. Firefox - 65.33%
2. Safari - 16.56%
3. IE - 7.84%
7.0 - 46.53%
8.0 - 28.97%
6.0 - 23.69%
4. Chrome - 5.42%
5. Mozilla - 2.36%
6. Opera - 2.06%They also disabled Jeff Atwood's multi-city search: http://www.codinghorror.com/craigslist/ (he posted the letter he got from them)
Then again, http://www.housingmaps.com/ is still functional, and might be the most popular Craigslist mashup -- I'm assuming they have a deal in place with CL.
What really matters to me is how the licensing is handled. I.e., as long as I own full rights and can pull my game out of their system whenever I want (i.e., if I find that my game is popular enough that I think I can self publish or if I find an established company that wants to buy it), then I don't really mind that they take such a large %. It's still a cheap way to prototype and sell to real game players to get feedback. :)
Anyway, this sounds awesome, but now it means less sleep for the next couple of weeks while I pull all those random scraps of paper that make up my game ideas into something more formal. ;)
Shouldn't they have known how many paying customers were below the 1GB threshold and been able to anticipate all that lost revenue? It seems like it should have been obvious from the start that the 1GB free was too high for them. Why not 250mb or 100mb or 50mb or whatever was below where all those high profit paying customers were sitting?
Freemium, as I understand it, is about providing a useful free service but with constraints that are hit by serious users fairly quickly. Useful enough that the product is usable and will entice a user to want to pay to keep using it, but with constraints enough that it won't be useful forever if they keep using it (i.e., they'll hit the limits and have to pay). Seems like for Phanfare, 1GB was way too much space -- users were finding the service useful, but never hitting up against that constraint.
The example would have made more sense if the author had said people type "Facebook" looking for "Facebook.com"
In fact, in the given example, the non-numbered version of the title sounds like it should be more authoritative. It goes from an interpretation of, "a list of 20 common mistakes," to one of, "a list of /the/ common mistakes." I.e., to me at least, the second option has an implication of being a list of all the common mistakes, while the former implies that this while this is a list of 20 mistakes, there could be more.
It is the adjective ("amazing," "killer," "must-have," etc.) present in the title and NOT the number that conveys authority, completeness, etc.
Perhaps I am the exception, though, and not the rule.
Still blurry for me... ah well.