fredsters_s

As a long-time beta user I can tell you that it works as described.

I love it how everyone is extrapolating their personal cruise ship experiences -> every cruise ship in the world ever.

It's got nothing to do with bootstrapping.

Exactly.

Great feedback dude! Thanks. We will try and take this approach in the future.

Thanks Sasha! It's actually custom, based on a bunch of technologies though. I'm going to do a blog post this week about it, and we've open-sourced the template at https://github.com/rainforestapp/middleman-boilerplate. The stack is:

- Scss

- Susy

- Compass

- Haml

- Middleman

- S3

It's probably instructive to think about the type of product that you'd be dogfooding.

For most startups, dogfooding is a process of heavily using your own product to figure out what works and what doesn't and better understand the painpoints in the product from your customer's perspective.

That process changes quite significantly - what we're calling 'extreme' dogfooding - when the product you are dogfooding is a crucial part of your build process, because you cannot deploy if the product isn't working properly, whereas with most products that aren't developer tools a problem found through dogfooding isn't going to do something as drastic as preventing your deploy :)

Hey Adrian, Fred, co-founder here. Yeah, our docs need some love :)

It's totally seamless, so as soon as you run a test we allocate (multiple) human testers automatically and your results come back within 30 mins on average. The median time to being allocated a first tester for a test is (in the last 30 days) is 2min 29s.

We have a massive crowd of testers available, so in general response time is fairly consistent.

The majority of our tech is on the backend for scoring and sorting results and testers. There's a bunch of sorting that happens in the background between a tester submitting a 'result' and Rainforest verifying that result and returning it to the customer.

Does that answer your questions?

The difference is that because we're using Rainforest in our build process we cannot deploy if Rainforest itself doesn't work... so it's a bit more 'extreme' than regular dogfooding.

The problem with this kind of argument is that it is based on an inherently sexist worldview - that attractive women are good for nothing more than being attractive. Which is obviously bullshit.

Also I don't know where you all work but where I work engineers + 'looking professional' (however the fuck you even define that) barely ever mix.

You are EVERYthing that is wrong with startups. I would advise you to quit criticising the audacity of a team that is trying to change the world for the better. How many startups can legitimately say that?!

Since most people scan left-to-right you'd probably be better putting your main headline and signup box on the left and the 'reasons' on the right. Even better would be to make the headline and strapline standalone, because at the moment the hierarchy when the user scans implies they are just relevant to that signup box, not the whole site. Great idea.

really nice conceptual approach.

Yeah it is an interesting choice. I may be wrong, but when I saw the first Vines shared by Kevin Rose on twitter they were without sound. I think it was a conscious effort to differentiate themselves from gifs, and all the internet baggage that come with them

It's really not about just capturing what's in front of you. That's easy, you can do that with the built in Camera. The only thing this app adds is some sugar around that experience.

The crux of why video isn't like photo is that editing it is so bloody difficult... and the only way you create compelling video is through editing. This app does nothing to help that.

Good point. dmor wrote about this yesterday http://refer.ly/is_twitter_s_vine_launch_a_response_to_popul...

I don't think they can, no. But twitter didn't build vine, they acquired it. Can twitter and Facebook acquire the next big thing? Sure :)

It can also be beautiful though, sound is just another texture to work with. The thing that comes to mind are Wes Anderson's many 'breakfast sequences' where he shows preparation in jump cut 'vine' style

Do you have anything to back this up? Articles etc? I heard lack of liquidity was the issue

It's a relative term. Vine launched what, a week ago, and already all of us know about it.

Nothing in the post implies I support this self-curation. I don't. Also, the quotes around 'creative' are instructive.

I'd love to see some data that supports what you're saying

AFAIK no, it was in a fairly late (pre-launch) beta stage before being acquired, and raised a seed round from GV among others (hence Kevin Rose posting Vines when it was still in private beta).

Totally agree. I'm surprised that Twitter didn't. I wonder what the story behind that is

It's just tacky. If I know anything about Dorsey it's that he's allergic to tacky

Interesting question. I'm not sure - it doesn't seem intuitively like Twitter / Dorsey (as far as i can tell Vine is Dorsey's pet project) would stoop to that kind of stuff.

One point I didn't explicitly make in the post: Vine is not about gifs, it's about video.

awesome as always ian

Interesting. This still needs to play out, but it seems like a lesson to geography-bound US startups (airbnb, stripe etc). I guess the question is, how much does execution count for? If I'm a Europe-based dev, do I really care that this isn't Stripe?

totally agree!