drb311

The style works because she's going on an adventure of discovery and taking us along for the ride.

Loose guesses that you hope are good enough are more fun than exact calculations. It's fun watching Indiana Jones guessing how much sand he needs to equal the weight of the statue, and it makes him seem more heroic. In that case he might have been better taking his time to do it properly, though.

Our minds are programmed to learn in a particular way:

- Try stuff

- See what happens

- Try to guess at a rule that would explain why it happened

- Test your guess by trying other stuff

... repeat until you know everything

It's fun sharing that process with another person, and a pretty good way to learn too -- especially where precision is not important. Technical writers should use it more.

Yes, that does make it harder.

But a few things make it easier too:

1. Twitter can see all messages from the sender -- if the stream contains a lot of suspect material and was created recently (for example), that makes any individual Tweet more suspect. No individual mail client can do this. 2. A 'false positive' in Twitter has a lower cost than in email. People ignore tweets all the time, so hiding the wrong thing sometimes won't matter so much. 3. Twitter is a more constrained platform, so the problem domain is presumably more limited.

I don't mean to say it's easy or even "not very hard" to pull this off -- just that it is either well within Twitter's capabilities, or soon could be.

Is identifying a threatening or abusive tweet any harder than identifying a spam email? Modern filters can get rid of most spam mails pretty well, and don't delete much that the receiver will miss.

Seconded. (And Patio11, I've been stalking you...)

Another highlight, showing how POF early on was all about surprising and obvious innovations (presumably at the expense of polish, as noted elsewhere in the thread). If you're bootstrapping, polish is not your friend. Risky innovations are.

http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2013/02/12/10-years-since-...

I particularly love that the blog is still using the default Wordpress theme from years ago. :)

The way I see it, Snapchat as a unique fun little app that had a very specific use case. That's what users loved about it.

But VCs aren't so keen on quirky little apps... they want an app that everybody uses all the time. This release is an attempt to take Snapchat more into the mainstream messaging market, even if that means losing its original appeal.

VCs would rather pursue a small chance of being number 1 in a major category to a big chance of being a popular niche player.

Felix Salmon's review and analysis based on the book is more informative than the book itself, read it:

http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2014/04/21/the-most-ex...

The perfect wearables strategy.

It's amazing how addictive a nonsensical navigation system can be.

Also: has he been working out? His chin seems to shrink a bit with every new video.

Yes! My first thought was that if abolishing net neutrality forces entrepreneurs to develop less trivial ideas then it might not be such a bad thing.

Thanks Fred for explaining why the examples are so bad! And it's reassuring that even VCs don't have great ideas popping into their heads every time.

The digital native myth AND the myth that people only click ads by mistake both need to end. Sometimes people use Google with buying intent, and the ads are the best and most appropriate result returned.

If anything younger users are likely to see ads as a valid part of the Internet and not as a corruption of the old web they used to know, unlike grizzled fogies like us.