foulmouthboy

And people wonder what happened to things like "responsibility". This is a professor teaching this? Whatever happened to the golden rule?

The article mentions it, but the achievement aspect of Foursquare is a Very Significant Differentiator as opposed to a footnote.

You have two competing services with similar functionality and one is fun to use. Investors are betting that the fun to use one is the one that will catch on and stick now and in the future. The fact that the not-so-fun competitor is making money should make Foursquare investors jump for joy. It's a proof of business concept that's been done for them.

Do people just upvote on interesting titles because the Wikipedia article has no information on its own. Why not just link to this: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific-fundament...

And if said potential employee doesn't happen to play sports, then, to quote the article, "That's BULLSHIT"?

Just in case they haven't: https://www.google.com/analytics/siteopt/exptlist?account=50...

Engineers should be data driven.

Really? There are that many 54 year old overweight women who read HN?

My apologies.

I'm absolutely positive that this can not be generalized to the whole population. Furthermore, I am completely sure that this report has absolutely nothing to do with HN's primary, secondary nor tertiary audience. The submitter should be absolutely ashamed at himself for posting something that should not come within miles of a site like this. It is not even fit for Reddit.

Talk on the Google Analytics Authorized Consultants board is that this solution produces unreliable numbers.

Here's the analysis posted from Mike Plummer, another web analyst:

Code does not read utmz cookie from firefox but does from other browsers. Code writes incorrect referrer cookie as the current page URL.. since the code cannot see the true referring URL as it’s being instantiated from an img tag, so the referring URL will always be the current page being viewed. This means the traffic sources reports are not reliable and definitely means you should not use your main domain’s cookies i.e. company.com with this script as you’ll pollute your man GA profile cookie data with incorrect or partial data. You will get a reliable count of unique visitors and visits so far as I can tell. I would not advise using this code to write utm cookies on your live domain though anyway, just in case it’s corrupting the utma cookie in some way I can’t detect. GA also throws away visits with invalid utmz cookies, so firefox visits will be incorrect. The pageview metrics are going to be off too. Every browser I tested caches the tracking pixel since there is no cache defeat mechanism.

Obviously, if you're just going to copy Facebook's offerings, you might as well copy Facebook's launch plan and marketing. Their high level marketing strategy is very well documented and most of the tactics can be inferred.

Secondary suggestion: Pick a niche and focus on it.

It's useful to think about your use case. Why would anybody ever make a quiz?

It's much more fun to take the quizzes. The payoff for somebody to take a quiz is to learn something about themselves even if it's meaningless. In comparison, it looks very very difficult to make a quiz with little payoff. Why do I REALLY care about quizzing random people I don't know? I have to come up with clever titles, clever questions, clever answers, etc? I think I'd rather just take another quiz or go do something else.

That said, the main thing I'd do is come up with some interim calls to action between making a full quiz and taking a quiz. Maybe give people the ability to modify existing quizzes. Maybe give people the ability to make a question and give other people the ability to come up with fake answers. Anything at all to give the site some sort of learning curve towards making full quizzes.

Too true, but... Rule #1 for wanting to profit off of something that's actually innocuous: Make a big deal about how the innocuous thing is actually dangerous to you and your family and then sue the richest person you can find.

This is a list of people who "belong" on Twitter.

I read this post and the post that it was critiquing and both came to the same conclusion: Knowing the who/what/when/where throughout history is only useful when understanding the Why as well.

I'm so glad to see social media articles that include actual tactics. Everybody knows the "strategy" to social media is "engagement" and "conversation" and it's refreshing to actually be presented with a proposed tactical plan.

These three things aren't really new in web analytics nor specific to social.

And it's blatant misinformation to describe "traditional web analytics tools" as "useless" when it comes to tracking dynamic pages that don't render new pageviews. This is especially misinformed if we're talking about Google Analytics, SiteCatalyst, NetInsight, WebTrends, or just about any tool which can handle event tracking, which has been a standard feature in web analytics for years.

The recurring theme here is that Amazon didn't properly communicate anything to most of the people who were affected. The publisher is behaving very strategically at this point in attempting to promote its newly formed partnership with Apple and Amazon basically played into their hands by not presenting their side of the story soon enough.

Three big things that I can see:

1. Lots of things in similar categories take pictures, so it just feels like an oversight.

2. Video chat is one of the applications that would seem right up the iPad's alley.

3. The number and types of augmented reality applications (such as the ones already appearing on iPhone) are more likely to increase in the future and the iPad as is would be left out of any of those developments.

Better yet, this explains why football games are so exciting. Constant anticipation for the next burst of action. Enough action within those brief bursts to review, replay and analyze, just in time for the next burst of action.

Personally, I like more information better. If my app stops working and I get a relatively terse communication that explicitly tells me not to contact anybody about problems or error messages then I know for SURE I'm contacting someone.

I didn't find the first email hilarious, but this one for sure is less than or equal to that email in its hilarity.

Do you realize what you're saying? Starting at birth, the entire learning process is trying to achieve things that one isn't currently capable of. Taking what you wrote at face value, children should never even go to school if they haven't already learned everything they intend to learn.

You have to think of the goals of the desired user versus somebody trying to game the system. Twitter apparently wants users to not just think about building follower count.

Why would a casual user ever want to unfollow somebody just because that person has stopped following? The only possible reason is to use that now vacant follow on somebody who's more likely to follow them back, which is the exact strategy of scammers taken to an extreme level.

Incidentally, if Twitter really didn't want people trying to game the system, they probably shouldn't have made the system so much like a game.

Even if it was intended, it doesn't change the fact that Episodes 1-3 were terrible films.

To give the phone a little credit, it did take the reporter a few smacks before he got it right. Even though the phone obviously isn't "unbreakable", I doubt anyone could take their iPhone, dunk it in water and then smack it even once like that.

I think my favorite explanation of wisdom versus intelligence came when reading about how D&D players should think of it: Intelligence tells you it's raining inside. Wisdom tells you to open the umbrella.

When we get to the point that we can just download all the information we want directly into our brains, it's going to be those with wisdom that will know what to do with it.

Re: P7-P9. I don't think the author is confused at all. It seems to me that those in the market for a netbook would strongly consider a tablet as an alternative (if a tablet wasn't already in their consideration).

In a year or two, I could see somebody's technology collection consisting of smartphone/laptop|desktop/netbook|tablet. I have a harder time imagining the average consumer being interested in both a netbook and a tablet.

I have to disagree. I would say that anything that helps get to a testable solution faster helps make one a better coder. This could be by saving time having to look up syntax, but it could also literally be just typing twice as fast as somebody and being able to iterate through solutions twice as fast as the next guy.

In the South, using "sir" and "ma'am" is par for the course. When I lived there, it took some getting used to, particularly because I couldn't help thinking how false it would sound back in California.

I think part of what would irritate me here is not just that they've taken away free soda, but they're now actively charging me for it. I wonder if it would've come across better if there just wasn't any soda offered in the office anymore.

Maybe it's totally illogical, but I'd be more irritated with the idea that the company not only took away this perk, but is now trying to make a profit off of it.

I suspect that we'll see a much bigger push towards biodiesel as high fructose corn syrup continues to get attacked. Also, anybody capable of growing corn should be capable of growing soybeans, which is something that's also added to every type of food (if not an outright substitute). The corn growers will adapt.

It does apply to you in that you probably won't live as long as the rest of us. :)