ceslami

Haha, I'm sure. As far as product design goes, I think you've done a bang-up job. Individual branches are easy on the eyes and comfortable to consume for extended periods, and the primary actions are easy to identify. congrats on the launch.

Out of curiosity, where does it fit into your workflow specifically? Do you find yourself using either/any of Facebook, Twitter, Email, etc. less in particular?

Threading in Gmail was definitely huge. They beat a lot of desktop mail clients to the punch, too, which always surprised me.

Seems like Branch would become One More Thing To Check, as opposed to a replacement for e-mail. I don't think they're going for an replacement, either. I think I get their point, but I also can't see it as much more than Twitter repackaged with unique slang and a squeaky clean UI.

Let me see if I've got this right.

Branch : Invite-Only Online Conversations. Email : Invite-Only Online Conversations.

Can someone help me bridge the gap?

He's making a good point -- how can it be sustainable without profit? Of course it needn't be sustainable to generate profit, but that's not what he meant, or said.

As a guy who spends a lot of time writing JS, what are the good parts of JS that CS optimizes for, and what are the parts it ignores that you do not want to use?

I take issue with the author's point that:

"A free-based service, supported by advertisers, has tons of incentive to keep its users just as happy as a fee-based service. Why? Because if it doesn't, people go elsewhere and the advertisers go with them."

For the average consumer internet site, happy users does not equate to happy advertisers. As Facebook shows, you can have "happy" users -- in that they don't leave -- but create a dismal product for advertisers. They cannot optimize for advertisers without compromising the user experience. App.net will never need to optimize for advertisers, so they can focus completely on the user experience, or platform experience.

Edit: Removed quote from code block. PG - Markdown parser?

imbdapi got shut down: http://www.imdbapi.com/

Not that this completely contradicts your point, but often a non-black/white shadow is web design is awesome. Subtle moves like high-saturation shadows that match your color scheme, which Ian discusses, are something I employ often (for both inset and outset shadows).

Your baseless pessimism is annoying at best.

He is by no means a private figure -- a move like that would certainly destroy his reputation.

Have you taken a moment to read anything about it? It is abundantly clear.

join.app.net, in case you really haven't, which I'm hoping is the case.

The light gray color of your comments should give you a hint as to how welcome they are in this community.

That's an interesting point, and I definitely think that sponsoring an event attended by your target audience is a big step up from TV or billboards.

Now this gets heady: "People are willing to pay a premium for things they can track." Perhaps advertising vectors which are easily tracked, thus optimized, yield more valuable per dollar spent. If this is the case, demand for this inventory (Adwords, etc) increases. You would expect it to become more expensive by forces of the market. This is why you don't see people lined up to fill billboard inventory, especially in the last 10 years.

It is a chicken-egg problem in some ways, but I think people are willing to pay more because their advertising/conversion math enables it, and that math is easier to back up with facts.

Sponsorship is functionally brand awareness advertising, as opposed to conversion-oriented advertising. Sponsorship likens closer to the days of billboards and TV ads, when you either "felt the effects" or didn't, very qualitatively.

Why do you, and "any marketer," think we're headed away from conversion-oriented, highly quantitative models of advertising?

Don't work good!

From a TechCrunch article published yesterday, following an interview with John Borthwick:

"According to Borthwick, it would have cost “hundreds of thousands per month” to keep the site running on its old platform. Even though the site was state-of-the-art just a few years ago, most of the infrastructure would be considered legacy technology by a modern startup."

That's why. SF Weekly, and the author Keith Plocek, obviously did not reach out to Betaworks before running this article.

1) By using FB, at least initially, they can lower signup friction and get a good bit of social momentum. Especially if users are sharing their "diggs" publicly. Doesn't appeal to hackers, but it works when done tastefully.

2) Discussion on digg was always a bit janky. HN really spoils the idea of social links/comments because they are so high quality here, but when you're targeting the average person, its harder to control quality. Let people sound of on Twitter/FB, and you've created a new marketing vector without directly polluting the experience on your site.

No, I haven't, because its illegal.

Startup intern attempts marketing ploy over HN

You can write meaningful, production-ready code if you have the skills.

It seems like you have only worked at large companies, which is fine, but that is likely the core of the "self-fulfilling prophecy" you mention in point #1. If you want to write production code, don't work somewhere that puts 5 levels between you and the deploy scripts.

Selling lenses completely breaks their business model and competitive advantage. If Apple is so good at selling computers, why don't they sell motherboards? Not to mention the addressable market...

Your meta-pedantics are killing me. Love JS Weekly btw :)

I absolutely agree with you. As crazy as it is, most people don't realize that news programs project the agenda of their corporate parents -- the media just "speaks the truth."

To me, the most shocking about SOPA has been the way it is portrayed in the media. Imagine reading this passage if you weren't "in-the-know" (as many of us would like to think we are):

"But most of the major players in the technology industry, including Google and Facebook, are strongly opposed to the legislation because they say they would be forced to police their websites for possibly illegal content. Google, which owns YouTube, says the language is so broad that videos of teenagers dancing would be banned because of the copyrighted music playing in the background. And that would stifle innovation, they say."

The media is minimizing the issue to corporate laziness, and thats really not okay. I sense snarkiness, especially in the last line, and I think an outlet like CBS has an obligation to do better than that.

This is the definition of a corner case. Google is smart, but it can't read your mind. Give it a hand, and think like a computer.

I don't think they are going to "just plug in to Skype" -- sources seem to suggest that there will be some sort of browser based experience. That said, they can definitely get a leg up on Google+ if they don't require you to download a plug-in.

To me, the ability to make a tabbed space is essential to any text editor. Any chance of that feature rolling out?

Their fonts are definitely worth paying for, though. If you're into that sort of thing...

I think they should use whatever verb results in the highest conversion rates. Who cares about semantics -- it's more important that the designers are getting paid.

Edit: typo.

Premium themes work for Tumblr.

I will agree with you, and amend my position to coincide with zeynel1.

It isn't that paywalls are bad -- good content should be paid for. I just don't think it makes sense to submit a link to a site when only a subset of that site's users can see it. Ruins the fun...