drm237

I would guess file encoding is not at all the limiting factor since often times opcode caches mean that the file is only read once anyway. The problem is that you get input for all sorts of other areas like forms, databases, web services, etc. most of which aren't UTF-16.

You may want to experiment with adding an "Emotional State" option to your support form following the Wufoo approach. They say that a large number of people fill it out and the byproduct is that people use calmer language because they are conveying how they feel through the dropdown instead of having to do it in the text.

edit: Here's the link to their blog post: http://particletree.com/features/on-asking-users-for-their-f...

How can you possibly compare a consumer service ment to make it easy to access files across multiple devices with a backup solution ment only for the most technical people? Can you imaging if ZumoDrive had you (or your parents?!) generate your own crypto keys which you would then have to manually transfer to your iphone when you wanted to access your data on it? Think a web interface sounds nice? Great, just login with your username, password, and crypto keys (that hopefully you have memorized), so we can decrypt your files and render a web interface.

The article makes some decent point and if you're storing the nuclear launch codes, yeah, don't put them in ZumoDrive. Otherwise, the article would have been much more useful if it suggested alternatives that would still operate within ZumoDrive's existing user experience.

Wait, so you "give away" gift cards that you won't use while this site gives you the ability to sell those gift cards which means money in your pocket and you don't think they're solving a valid problem?

"better" is relative. Sure the winters would be nice for living outdoors, but the summers would likely kill you.

Receiving a Cease and Desist letter is another likely outcome that effectively cuts off access. And while your analogy of Google deciding they won't offer free gmail is ridiculous, it's also worth pointing out that they have shutdown gmail accounts for violating the gmail TOS.

Dan was one of those amazing people that did more for us than we could ever hope to do for him. He gave more in his short time here than most of us could hope to give in a lifetime.

Hang in there Tom.

that's because they're only allowed to use paint...

From the article:

Though it had been expected that LRO would be able to resolve the remnants of the Apollo mission, these first images came before the spacecraft reached its final mapping orbit. Future LROC images from these sites will have two to three times greater resolution.

True, two way hashing is better than nothing, but it's still less secure than one way hashing (with a per-user salt) for passwords. All you need if one rogue employee and they can decrypt everyone's password. It's just difficult to justify the added risk when there usually isn't a need to retrieve the original password.

Edit: by "two way hashing" I meant encryption, not hashing. not sure where my brain was on that one...

I disagree that not being able to tell someone their password is a usability problem. Having a password reset system is just as usable and significantly more secure than having to store passwords in plain text.

And both of your arguments about having bigger problems are fundamentally flawed. Sure, if someone does get your db, you have a big problem, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't take precautions so that if it somehow happens they can't read it like a book. It's kind of like you're saying cars shouldn't have airbags because it's harder to honk the horn and if you do get in an accident, you've got bigger problems.

And someone snooping on your email is as easy as you accessing your webmail on an unencrypted wifi connection. Do you think everyone in the world makes sure they use the ssl version of their webmail in public? Because if not, sniffing packets is trivially easy.

My point is that the situations you mentioned only become bigger problems when you make no effort to protect these things.

only if it's your neighbors...

Depending on your requirements, outsourcing the first version might be the best option. Check out http://www.plaxo.com/api/widget

If you can, also move all of your static content to S3 including every image, css, and js file. You're currently serving ~47 requests per user to load the home page. If you move all of your static stuff to s3, each client makes 1 maybe 2 requests to your server instead of 47.

If you're using apache, any content, including static files, has a huge memory overhead to serve. Also, because you're not setting far-futures expires headers, users have to check for every static item every time just to get a 304 not modified.

Last bit of advice, get firebug http://getfirebug.com/ and add yslow http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/.

They've made pretty great improvements to the availablity and reliability. It still goes down, but not nearly as often as it did. That despite virtually doubling their traffic in the last 6 months. So my guess is they have just about everyone focusing on optimizing and scaling.

I agree though, lots more they could do including a solid oauth implementation for the api...perpetually coming soon...

It's absolutely amazing how polarizing evite it. Some people swear it is the absolute best webapp on the internet and would be lost without it while others find it entirely perplexing that anyone uses it at all.

I got a chance to talk to Jeff from Twilio over a month ago and the service looks really promising, especially once they get some speech recognition integrated. Definitely check it out!

I think they're using comet for the requests so while the activity may be high when people are typing, during breaks it should be very low as opposed to ajax polling.

I do think that real-time is really needed for many applications. The few times I've tried collaborating on a google doc, I've given up because the lag introduced the possibility of overwriting each others edits. That and just a general annoyance with saying "Do you see it yet?" over and over.

What's the difference between "something even Google hasn’t been able to do" and "their scaling requirements made it impractical"? When you get past the semantics, it's essentially the same thing. Either way, they're not doing it.

Of course, I appreciate you suggesting it first though!

I second the Anyvite idea ;-)

The message is a bit vague, but we chose that wording because it conveys the point more succinctly than a complete explanation.

If someone forwards an email to a friend, that friend will be able to RSVP and comment on behalf of the forwarding user, but they won't be able to create/edit/cancel the event. All of the admin controls still require the admin to login.

We chose this as a matter of convenience since most people will refuse to RSVP anyway and if we required them to fill out a registration form first, we wouldn't be any better than evite. As noodle mentioned, if someone can RSVP on your behalf for a single event, it probably isn't the end of the world. It's completely depending on the security requirements of your app.

There is no presentation. No powerpoint, no projector, none. This isn't a business meeting. You walk in and they fire questions at you. You respond as best you can and realize that your only ability to steer the conversation is with the responses you give.

Hey, sorry we didn't respond earlier, just saw this post and the Anyvite reference.

Our system is very basic right now and needs to be expanded on in the future. We start by setting a return path on all emails we send. This directs any bounce messages to a single mailbox that we can then process.

Parsing the bounce messages for us is fairly easy. We took some ideas from David Rusenko's post at: http://david.weebly.com/1/post/2008/06/startup-email-monitor...

You seem to be trying to tie a bounce back to a specific outgoing message, which may or may not be the right thing to do depending on your application. For us, we only care about the email address it was sent to so we know not to send them anything else (if it's a hard bounce).

Best of luck.

I disagree that craigslist does what it does well. I think it does it extremely poorly. They've managed to get a huge critical mass though which means people will deal with the flaws because its where the content is.

I know what you mean by this but with dropbox you maintain a copy of your files on every computer so I'm not sure I agree that you're handing over control.

That said, I think they could sell a copy of their software (server and client) to companies and make a killing.

You forgot the operative word "web"....web developers. For existing apple developers, this is solid gold.

I would guess significantly more that 25%. I used to work at a huge consulting company that still ran IE6 and was only recently looking to upgrade. I consulted for a government agency which was using IE6 and had no intention of upgrading soon. In fact, IE7 is banned by some government agencies.

Most people that we've talked to about using facebook for events say that unless they're creating a large event, it's not worth going through facebook's multiple step process with a bunch of required fields. Any opinion on that?

We have lots of ideas for making money, all of which add value to the users. Currently, we're just looking to build a solid user base and confirm that we're on the right path of making something that people actually want.