dillydally

For Facebook "active" has always meant "signed on within the last 30 days."

That depends entirely on the cost of a mistake. If the cost of mistake is low, it's better to make a lots of decisions quickly than it is to try to get each decision correct.

The fact that 10% come from that page is a problem, not something to brag about.

They send out emails. They're not relying on people reading the blog.

Also, http://www.businessinsider.com/yelps-first-daily-deal-beats-...

If you're producing the slides for a live audience, this style is superior. People can read faster than you can talk, so if what you're saying is all packed onto the slides it creates a bad audience dynamic.

If, OTOH, the slide you're producing are intended to be read, denser, more informational slides are appropriate.

As with most things in life, what to do depends on who your audience is.

Or, rather, you just enter a URL and it tells you what frameworks the app is using.

You've met one, now!

Uh, sure, ok. Facebook "rode the fad" the same way Ford rode the car-driving fad.

You're not really saying anything at all, as far as I can tell.

I think it just becomes story-telling.

OpenID and OpenSocial aren't getting traction anywhere.

OpenID because it's a non-solution to a non-problem, and OpenSocial because Google didn't provide developers with the primary benefit of the Facebook Platform (distribution).

Plus the social networks that implemented it were lame and didn't monetize well. OTOH, Playdom gor their start on MySpace.

http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/27/playdom-acquired-by-disney-...

If Google built a "game center" and let people send invites through gchat, we might be talking.

Yeah, everyone knows that search is only good for driving traffic at other pages where you sell banner ads. Building a portal is the only viable long-term strategy, and Yahoo! has that locked up.

They made plenty of attempts. You're just ignorant of them.

Don't be an ass. You don't know the first thing about the people working there and what they have or haven't tried.

A simple back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that a freemium, subscription, or (uhm...) donation model won't work. We're talking six-figure revenue, most likely.

I guarantee you their current business model of modifying the SERPs and inserting links to Amazon and other affiliate programs is generating an order of magnitude more revenue than your proposed model would.

Funny. Do you have any actual information about how early they tried to find a business model? I suspect you don't.

So, the situation is this: we have a product lots of people want. The naive business model (freemium) won't work -- a simple back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that.

What do you do? Go forward building a very popular product and look for a business model, or quit because you can't think of how to make money from day 1?

Every company is around until it isn't. Blockbuster just declared bankruptcy -- does that make Blockbuster a fad?

Facebook is six years old. 500MM people use it every month. They are profitable and do over $1Bn in revenue. They have a platform, on top of which there is at least one $1Bn company (Zynga).

Groupon, also a $1Bn company, owes its success in large part to Facebook's ad platform.

Facebook is now moving into location and online payments. They will compete with PayPal, another $1Bn company (before being acquired by eBay).

Zynga is PayPal's second largest merchant, after eBay itself. Through Facebook credits, Facebook will be taking 30% of each of those transactions. They are building a database of credit card numbers to do it.

Tencent QQ, a Chinese social network with gaming elements -- most of the popular genres on Facebook were taken from popular Chinese social games, e.g., the farming genre -- is 15 years old and did over $1Bn in revenue last year.

Tencent's IM product has 610MM monthly active users and 63.2MM people with subscription accounts.

http://www.tencent.com/en-us/content/ir/fs/attachments/inves...

When does this stuff stop becoming a fad?

Sure, fine, there's some universe in which Facebook vanishes tomorrow. The demand is still there. Social networking is here to stay.

The only way Facebook will fall behind is if they slow down and let someone else pass them, but given their history of aggressive and forward-thinking innovation, that seems unlikely for at least the next 5 years and/or until Zuckerberg stops caring.

And "it's popular because everyone else is doing it" -- you just described every business built on top of network effects. Craigslist is popular because everyone is using it. Does that make Craigslist a fad? eBay? VRBO? Etsy? YouTube? HN?

Pet rocks were a fad. Slap bracelets were a fad. Snuggies are a fad. http://fmylife.com is a fad.

Do you really think Facebook is that? Really?

I also notice that you didn't cite a single piece of data. Do you have any to support your argument, or is it just your "intuition?"

I didn't read the part about validations. That's silly.

Even if you have to do it in the application layer, why would you need more than one SELECT? Just get the installed apps from the DB in a single query and do a set difference operation to only get the apps not already installed.

But I agree that putting the constraint in the DB layer is the correct solution. With MySQL you can just do INSERT IGNORE to only add apps not yet marked as being installed.

In what universe is Facebook a fad? There are billion-dollar companies built on their platform, ferchrissakes!

Erm, that solution is a little extreme, unless there are a few steps missing.

The first things I'd do: 1. Aggregate those inserts into a single SQL command. You never want to be issuing O(n) SQL queries per request.

2. Use InnoDB, not MyISAM, for the database engine. I assume it's MyISAM because he's talking about table locking. InnoDB has row-level locking, so you'll be able to INSERT and SELECT from a table concurrently.

I had a Facebook app with 20MM MAUs, and it worked fine with two machines. A component of the app was voting in polls, and I was processing ~10k votes per second. Each "vote" is an insert into a votes table.

Soo...not really sure how you go from "We're running too many INSERT queries and locking the tables!" to "Async queues and MongoDB!"

Doesn't that support pg's argument vs. Arrington's?

It was founded by Mitch Kapor. I think he knows a thing or two about starting companies...

$100k is an ok number for a one-person outfit, but it would be hard to support even one employee on that number.

In face, their current model of altering the Google SERPs almost certainly generates more revenue.

Who needs Dropbox when you can just run rsync?

Groupon

Yes, but the reason these brands weren't doing this before Gilt was because they were afraid selling excess inventory at a discount would associate their goods with that lower price-point.

Gilt gets around this by maintaining a semi-private space and having one-day sales.

Groupon isn't private, but it's time-constrained in the same way and for the same reason.

If I know a sale is on for one day only, I'm going to understand that the deal doesn't represent the every-day price.

Besides, we're in the middle of a huge recession. Damn straight people are price sensitive!

You're wrong and I'm happy to bet against you.

Proof points: 1. Tencent QQ is a Chinese social network for games. It's essentially Facebook+Zynga combined. Many of the top games on Facebook are ports of popular Chinese games, e.g., the farming genre. Tencent has been around for 12 years and did over $1Bn in revenue in 2009, representing a 61% increase in profits.

2. Over 500MM people use Facebook every month. That demand doesn't just disappear. The only way Facebook is going to lose is if someone comes along and gives people something better to do with their time.

3. Facebook has their pick of engineering talent in Silicon Valley. If you're an engineer looking ad a mid-sized startup, Facebook is the best place to work, hands down. Look at their open source projects (e.g., Cassandra.). How about their PHP compiler? Or their numerous patches to memcache? It's clearly an engineering-driven company.

4. Just because you think something is frivolous doesn't mean it isn't valuable. Was Atari frivolous? Electronic Arts? EA, obviously, is still around and immensely profitable. Moreover, the same VC that backed those companies also backed Apple, Oracle, and NVIDIA.

There are plenty of startups working on problems lower on the stack. One can innovate at any level -- why is Minecraft any less valuable than a video game that pushes the limits of modern 3D algorithms?

Was Facebook less innovative than PayPal? Oracle?

Personally, I think the attitude you show in your response is a defense mechanism. You feel like you're somehow "above" Facebook and therefore their success isn't valid.

There's a reason the deals on Groupon last only a day.

Your argument applies equally to Gilt, but I don't think people are going to start paying less for Diesel jeans.

How "productive" was Electronic Arts? It's from the same class as Adobe, etc.

Computers aren't just for spreadsheets.

OTOH, how are client developers supposed to get the word out? This will just encourage more aggressive tactics, like requiring people to tweet about the app to unlock certain features.

My money is on "Quora for enterprise." Yammer is also launching a Q&A product.

There was a question on Quora (can't find it now) about whether Quora itself was going to build an enterprise product, and they said no, there weren't any immediate plans.

Well, technically speaking, 0 correlation isn't an insult. It just means HN karma says nothing about your hacking ability.

If, OTOH, he said Corr(HackerNewsKarma, HackingAbility) = -1.0...